Page:Eliot - Daniel Deronda, vol. III, 1876.djvu/117

 is, Titus sending Berenice away from Rome after she has shared his palace for ten years—both reluctant, both sad—invitus invitam, as Suetonius hath it. I've found a model for the Roman brute."

"Shall you make Berenice look fifty? She must have been that."

"No, no; a few mature touches to show the lapse of time. Dark-eyed beauty wears well, hers particularly. But now, here is the fifth: Berenice seated lonely on the ruins of Jerusalem. That is pure imagination. That is what ought to have been—perhaps was. Now, see how I tell a pathetic negative. Nobody knows what became of her:—that is finely indicated by the series coming to a close. There is no sixth picture." Here Hans pretended to speak with a gasping sense of sublimity, and drew back his head with a frown, as if looking for a like impression on Deronda. "I break off in the Homeric style. The story is chipped off, so to speak, and passes with a ragged edge into nothing—le néant; can anything be more sublime, especially in French? The vulgar would desire to see her corpse and burial—perhaps her will read and her linen distributed. But now come and look at this on the easel. I have made some way there."