To Deronda this event of finding Mirah was as heart-stirring as anything that befell Orestes or Rinaldo. He sat up half the night, living again through the moments since he had first discerned Mirah on the river-brink, with the fresh and fresh vividness which belongs to emotive memory. When he took up a book to try and dull this urgency of inward vision, the printed words were no more than a network through which he saw and heard everything as clearly as before--saw not only the actual events of two hours, but possibilities of what had been and what might be which those events were enough to feed with the warm blood of passionate hope and fear. Something in his own experience caused Mirah's search after her mother to lay hold with peculiar force on his imagination. The first prompting of sympathy was to aid her in her search: if given persons were extant in London there were ways of finding them, as subtle as scientific experiment, the right machinery being set at work. But here the mixed feelings which belonged to Deronda's kindred experience naturally transfused themselves into his anxiety on behalf of Mirah.

To him this event of finding Mirah was heart-stirring. He sat up half the night, living again the moments since he had first seen Mirah on the river-brink, with the fresh vividness of emotive memory.
When he took up a book, the printed words were no more than a network through which he saw and heard everything as clearly as before - not only the actual events, but possibilities of what had been and what might be, imagined with hope and fear. Something in his own experience caused Mirah's search for her mother to grip his imagination. His first sympathetic instinct was to aid her in her search: there were ways of finding people in London. But here the mixed feelings of Deronda's own experience naturally transfused themselves into his anxiety for Mirah.
