t."

Again the laboratory door opened. This time it shut behind Miss
Middleton. She was highly flushed. Seeing them, she shook the storm
from her brows, with a dead smile; the best piece of serenity she could
put on for public wear.

She took a breath before she moved.

Vernon strode out of the house.

Clara swept up to Laetitia.

"You were deceived!"

The hard sob of anger barred her voice.

Laetitia begged her to come to her room with her.

"I want air: I must be by myself," said Clara, catching at her
garden-hat.

She walked swiftly to the portico steps and turned to the right, to
avoid the laboratory windows.

CHAPTER XXXIII

IN WHICH THE COMIC MUSE HAS AN EYE ON TWO GOOD SOULS

Clara met Vernon on the bowling-green among the laurels. She asked him
where her father was.

"Don't speak to him now," said Vernon.

"Mr. Whitford, will you?"

"It is not advisable just now. Wait."

"Wait? Why not now?"

"He is not in the right humour."

She choked. There are times when there is no medicine for us in sages,
we want slaves; we scorn to temporize, we must overbear. On she sped,
as if she had made the mistake of exchanging words with a post.

The scene between herself and Willoughby was a thick mist in her head,
except the burden and result of it, that he held to her fast, would
neither assist her to depart nor disengage her.

Oh, men! men! They astounded the girl; she could not define them to her
understanding. Their motives, their tastes, their vanity, their
tyranny, and the domino on their vanity, the baldness of their tyranny,
clinched her in feminine antagonism to brute power. She was not the
less disposed to rebellion by a very present sense of the justice of
what could be said to reprove her. She had but one answer: "Anything
but marry him!" It threw her on her nature, our last and headlong
advocate, who is quick as the flood to hurry us from the heights to our
level, and lower, if there be accidental gaps in the channel. For say
we have been guilty of misconduct: can we redeem it by violating that
which we are and live by? The question sinks us back to the
luxuriousness of a sunny relinquishment of effort in the direction
against tide. Our nature becomes ingenious in devices, penetrative of
the enemy, confidently citing its cause for being frankly elvish or
worse. Clara saw a particular way of forcing herself to be
surrendered. She shut her eyes from it: the sight carried her too
violen