"I should think she would be a more suitable model for Berenice," said Deronda, not knowing exactly how to express his discontent.
"Not a bit of it. The model ought to be the most beautiful Jewess in the world, and I have found her."
"Have you made yourself sure that she would like to figure in that character? I should think no woman would be more abhorrent to her. Does she quite know what you are doing?"
"Certainly. I got her to throw herself precisely into this attitude. Little mother sat for Gessius Florus, and Mirah clasped her knees." Here Hans went a little way off and looked at the effect of his touches.
"I dare say she knows nothing about Berenice's history," said Deronda, feeling more indignation than he would have been able to justify.
"Oh, yes, she does--ladies' edition. Berenice was a fervid patriot, but was beguiled by love and ambition into attaching herself to the arch-enemy of her people. Whence the Nemesis. Mirah takes it as a tragic parable, and cries to think what the penitent Berenice suffered as she wandered back to Jerusalem and sat desolate amidst desolation. That was her own phrase. I couldn't find it in my heart to tell her I invented that part of the story."
"Show me your Trasteverina," said Deronda, chiefly in order to hinder himself from saying something else.
"Shall you mind turning over that folio?" said Hans. "My studies of heads are all there. But they are in confusion. You will perhaps find her next to a crop-eared undergraduate."
After Deronda had been turning over the drawings a minute or two, he said-"These seem to be all Cambridge heads and bits of country. Perhaps I had better begin at the other end."
"No; you'll find her about the middle. I emptied one folio into another."
"Is this one of your undergraduates?" said Deronda, holding up a drawing. "It's an unusually agreeable face."
"That! Oh, that's a man named Gascoigne--Rex Gascoigne. An uncommonly good fellow; his upper lip, too, is good. I coached him before he got his scholarship. He ought to have taken honors last Easter. But he was ill, and has had to stay up another year. I must look him up. I want to know how he's going on."
"Here she is, I suppose," said Deronda, holding up a sketch of the Trasteverina.
"Ah," said Hans, looking at it rather contemptuously, "too coarse. I was unregenerate then."