one o'clock in the morning
He knew perfectly well where his wife was , and how she was behaving . Was he going to be a jealous husband ? Deronda imagined that to be likely ; but his imagination was as much astray about Grandcourt as it would have been about an unexplored continent where all the species were peculiar . He did not conceive that he himself was a likely subject of jealousy , or that he should give any pretext for it ; but the suspicion that a wife is not happy naturally leads one to speculate on the husband 's private deportment ; and Deronda found himself after one o'clock in the morning in the rather ludicrous position of sitting up severely holding a Hebrew grammar in his hands -LRB- for somehow , in deference to Mordecai , he had begun to study Hebrew -RRB- , with the consciousness that he had been in that attitude nearly an hour , and had thought of nothing but Gwendolen and her husband . To be an unusual young man means for the most part to get a difficult mastery over the usual , which is often like the sprite of ill-luck you pack up your goods to escape from , and see grinning at you from the top of your luggage van . The peculiarities of Deronda 's nature had been acutely touched by the brief incident and words which made the history of his intercourse with Gwendolen ; and this evening 's slight addition had given them an importunate recurrence . It was not vanity -- it was ready sympathy that had made him alive to a certain appealingness in her behavior toward him ; and the difficulty with which she had seemed to raise her eyes to bow to him , in the first instance , was to be interpreted now by that unmistakable look of involuntary confidence which she had afterward turned on him under the consciousness of his approach .