Page:Eliot - Daniel Deronda, vol. II, 1876.djvu/121

 latent admiration than bent on knowing anything more unfavourable that might have lain behind his slight objections to her singing; and the truth she had asked for with an expectation that it would be agreeable, had come like a lacerating thong.

"Too old—should have begun seven years ago—you will not, at best, achieve more than mediocrity—hard, incessant work, uncertain praise—bread coming slowly, scantily, perhaps not at all—mortifications, people no longer feigning not to see your blunders—glaring insignificance"—all these phrases rankled in her; and even more galling was the hint that she could only be accepted on the stage as a beauty who hoped to get a husband. The "indignities" that she might be visited with had no very definite form for her, but the mere association of anything called "indignity" with herself, roused a resentful alarm. And along with the vaguer images which were raised by those biting words, came the more precise conception of disagreeables which her experience enabled her to imagine. How could she take her mamma and the four sisters to London, if it were not possible for her to earn money at once? And as for submitting to be a protégée, and asking her mamma to submit with her to the humiliation of