Page:Eliot - Daniel Deronda, vol. I, 1876.djvu/118

 locked before the housekeeper gave me the key, for I tried it myself afterwards. Some one must have been to my drawer and taken the key."

It seemed to Isabel that Gwendolen’s awful eyes had rested on her more than on the other sisters, and without any time for resolve she said with a trembling lip, "Please forgive me, Gwendolen."

The forgiveness was sooner bestowed than it would have been if Gwendolen had not desired to dismiss from her own and every one else’s memory any case in which she had shown her susceptibility to terror. She wondered at herself in these occasional experiences, which seemed like a brief remembered madness, an unexplained exception from her normal life; and in this instance she felt a peculiar vexation that her helpless fear had shown itself, not, as usual, in solitude, but in well-lit company. Her ideal was to be daring in speech and reckless in braving dangers, both moral and physical; and though her practice fell far behind her ideal, this shortcoming seemed to be due to the pettiness of circumstances, the narrow theatre which life offers to a girl of twenty, who cannot conceive herself as anything else than a lady, or as in any position which would lack the tribute of respect. She had no perma-