rld against whose tongue
he stood defenceless. Within the shadow of his presence he compressed
opinion, as a strong frost binds the springs of earth, but beyond it
his shivering sensitiveness ran about in dread of a stripping in a
wintry atmosphere. This was the ground of his hatred of the world: it
was an appalling fear on behalf of his naked eidolon, the tender infant
Self swaddled in his name before the world, for which he felt as the
most highly civilized of men alone can feel, and which it was
impossible for him to stretch out hands to protect. There the poor
little loveable creature ran for any mouth to blow on; and frostnipped
and bruised, it cried to him, and he was of no avail! Must we not
detest a world that so treats us? We loathe it the more, by the measure
of our contempt for them, when we have made the people within the
shadow-circle of our person slavish.

And he had been once a young prince in popularity: the world had been
his possession. Clara's treatment of him was a robbery of land and
subjects. His grander dream had been a marriage with a lady of so
glowing a fame for beauty and attachment to her lord that the world
perforce must take her for witness to merits which would silence
detraction and almost, not quite (it was undesireable), extinguish
envy. But for the nature of women his dream would have been realized.
He could not bring himself to denounce Fortune. It had cost him a
grievous pang to tell Horace De Craye he was lucky; he had been
educated in the belief that Fortune specially prized and cherished
little Willoughby: hence of necessity his maledictions fell upon women,
or he would have forfeited the last blanket of a dream warm as poets
revel in.

But if Clara deceived him, he inspired her with timidity. There was
matter in that to make him wish to be deceived. She had not looked him
much in the face: she had not crossed his eyes: she had looked
deliberately downward, keeping her head up, to preserve an exterior
pride. The attitude had its bewitchingness: the girl's physical pride
of stature scorning to bend under a load of conscious guilt, had a
certain black-angel beauty for which he felt a hugging hatred: and
according to his policy when these fits of amorous meditation seized
him, he burst from the present one in the mood of his more favourable
conception of Clara, and sought her out.

The quality of the mood of hugging hatred is, that if you are
disallowed the hug, you do not hate