Page:Eliot - Daniel Deronda, vol. II, 1876.djvu/315

 that. It is so much easier to me to share in love than in hatred. I remember a play I read in German—since I have been here, it has come into my mind—where the heroine says something like that."

"Antigone," said Deronda.

"Ah, you know it. But I do not believe that my mother would wish me not to love my best friends. She would be grateful to them." Here Mirah had turned to Mrs Meyrick, and with a sudden lighting up of her whole countenance she said, "Oh, if we ever do meet and know each other as we are now, so that I could tell what would comfort her—I should be so full of blessedness, my soul would know no want but to love her!"

"God bless you, child!" said Mrs Meyrick, the words escaping involuntarily from her motherly heart. But to relieve the strain of feeling she looked at Deronda and said, "It is curious that Mirah, who remembers her mother so well, it is as if she saw her, cannot recall her brother the least bit—except the feeling of having been carried by him when she was tired, and of his being near her when she was in her mother's lap. It must be that he was rarely at home. He was already grown up. It is a pity her brother should be quite a stranger to her."