except in the steadfast spiritual strength yielded her by Deronda.  That such a contrasting of the two great phases of life was a part of George Eliot’s purpose she has herself acknowledged.  A comparison of the spiritual histories of Gwendolen and Deronda will show how earnest was this purpose of the author.  Gwendolen is a type of those souls who have no spiritual anchorage in the religious life and traditions of their people.  At the opening of chapter third we are told she had no home memories, that “this blessed persistence in which affection can take root had been wanting in Gwendolen’s life.”  At the end of the sixth chapter we are also told that she had no insight into spiritual realities, that the bonds of spiritual power and moral retribution had not been made apparent to her mind.

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 permanent consciousness of other fetters, or of more spiritual restraints, having always disliked whatever was presented to her under the name of religion, in the same way that some people dislike arithmetic and accounts:  it had raised no other emotion in her, no alarm, no longing; so that the question whether she believed it, had not occurred to her, any more than it had occurred to her to inquire into the conditions of colonial property and banking, on which, as she had had many opportunities of knowing, the family fortune was dependent.  All these facts about herself she would have been ready to admit, and even, more or less indirectly, to state.  What she unwillingly recognized, and would have been glad for others to be unaware of, was that liability of hers to fits of spiritual dread, though this fountain of awe within her had not found its way into connection with the religion taught her, or with any human relations.  She was ashamed and frightened, as at what might happen again, in remembering her tremor on suddenly feeling herself alone, when, for example, she was walking without companionship and there came some rapid change in the light.  Solitude in any wide scene impressed her with an undefined feeling of immeasurable existence aloof from her, in the midst of which she was helplessly incapable of asserting herself.  The little astronomy taught her at school used sometimes to set her imagination at work in a way that made her tremble; but always when some one joined her she recovered her indifference to the vastness in which she seemed an exile; she found again her usual world, in which her will was of some avail, and the religious nomenclature belonging to this world was no more identified for her with those uneasy impressions of