"I am not looking for anything, but I am relenting," said Gwendolen, speaking in a submissive tone.
"May I know the reason?"
"I should like to hear Miss Lapidoth and have lessons from her, since you admire her so much,--that is, of course, when we go to town. I mean lessons in rejoicing at her excellence and my own deficiency," said Gwendolen, turning on him a sweet, open smile.
"I shall be really glad for you to see and hear her," said Deronda, returning the smile in kind.
"Is she as perfect in every thing else as in her music?"
"I can't vouch for that exactly. I have not seen enough of her. But I have seen nothing in her that I could wish to be different. She has had an unhappy life. Her troubles began in early childhood, and she has grown up among very painful surroundings. But I think you will say that no advantages could have given her more grace and truer refinement."
"I wonder what sort of trouble hers were?"
"I have not any very precise knowledge. But I know that she was on the brink of drowning herself in despair."
"And what hindered her?" said Gwendolen, quickly, looking at Deronda.
"Some ray or other came--which made her feel that she ought to live--that it was good to live," he answered, quietly. "She is full of piety, and seems capable of submitting to anything when it takes the form of duty."
"Those people are not to be pitied," said Gwendolen, impatiently. "I have no sympathy with women who are always doing right. I don't believe in their great sufferings." Her fingers moved quickly among the edges of the music.
"It is true," said Deronda, "that the consciousness of having done wrong is something deeper, more bitter. I suppose we faulty creatures can never feel so much for the irreproachable as for those who are bruised in the struggle with their own faults. It is a very ancient story, that of the lost sheep--but it comes up afresh every day."
"That is a way of speaking--it is not acted upon, it is not real," said Gwendolen, bitterly. "You admire Miss Lapidoth because you think her blameless, perfect. And you know you would despise a woman who had done something you thought very wrong."
"That would depend entirely upon her own view of what she had done," said Deronda.
"You would be satisfied if she were very wretched, I suppose," said Gwendolen, impetuously.