Page:Eliot - Daniel Deronda, vol. III, 1876.djvu/42

 sweet speeches that everything we say seems tasteless."

"Quite true," said Gwendolen, bending her head and smiling. "Mr Grandcourt won me by neatly turned compliments. If there had been one word out of place it would have been fatal."

"Do you hear that?" said Sir Hugo, looking at the husband.

"Yes," said Grandcourt, without change of countenance. "It is a deucedly hard thing to keep up, though."

All this seemed to Sir Hugo a natural playfulness between such a husband and wife; but Deronda wondered at the misleading alternations in Gwendolen's manner, which at one moment seemed to invite sympathy by childlike indiscretion, at another to repel it by proud concealment. He tried to keep out of her way by devoting himself to Miss Juliet Fenn, a young lady whose profile had been so unfavourably decided by circumstances over which she had no control, that Gwendolen some months ago had felt it impossible to be jealous of her. Nevertheless when they were seeing the kitchen—a part of the original building in perfect preservation—the depth of shadow in the niches of the stone walls and groined vault, the play of light from the huge glowing fire