atred. 'Tell my father that, and tell him anything else you like. I
want no one to take any thought for me; and I wouldn't do as _you_
wish, not to save my soul!'

How often, in passing along the streets, one catches a few phrases of
discord such as this! The poor can seldom command privacy; their scenes
alike of tenderness and of anger must for the most part be enacted on
the peopled ways. It is one of their misfortunes, one of the many
necessities which blunt feeling, which balk reconciliation, which
enhance the risks of dialogue at best semi-articulate.

Clara, having uttered the rancour which had so long poisoned her mind,
straightway crossed the street and entered the house where she was
lodging. She had just returned from making several applications for
employment--futile, as so many were likely to be, if she persevered in
her search for a better place than the last. The wages due to her for
the present week she had of course sacrificed; her purchases of
clothing--essential and superfluous--had left only a small sum out of
her earnings. Food, fortunately, would cost her little; the difficulty,
indeed, was to eat anything at all.

She was exhausted after her long walk, and the scene with Sidney had
made her tremulous. In thrusting open the windows, as soon as she
entered, she broke a pane which was already cracked; the glass cut into
her palm, and blood streamed forth. For a moment she watched the red
drops falling to the floor, then began to sob miserably, almost as a
child might have done. The exertion necessary for binding the wound
seemed beyond her strength; sobbing and moaning, she stood in the same
attitude until the blood began to congeal. The tears, too, she let dry
unneeded upon her eyelashes and her cheeks; the mist with which for a
time they obscured her vision was nothing amid that cloud of misery
which blackened about her spirit as she brooded. The access of
self-pity was followed, as always, by a persistent sense of intolerable
wrong, and that again by a fierce desire to plunge herself into ruin,
as though by such act she could satiate her instincts of defiance. It
is a phase of exasperated egotism common enough in original natures
frustrated by circumstance--never so pronounced as in those who suffer
from the social disease. Such mood perverts everything to cause of
bitterness. The very force of sincerity, which Clara could not but
recognise in Kirkwood's appeal, inflamed the resentment she nouris