, what she would do if she could, what she thought
it _possible_ to do. She answered first reluctantly, then eagerly, her
pride all alive to show that she was not merely ignorant and amateurish.
But it was no good. In the end he made her feel as Antony Craven had
constantly done--that she knew nothing exactly, that she had not
mastered the conditions of any one of the social problems she was
talking about; that not only was her reading of no account, but that she
had not even managed to _see_ these people, to interpret their lives
under her very eyes, with any large degree of insight.

Especially was he merciless to all the Lady Bountiful pose, which meant
so much to her imagination--not in words so much as in manner. He let
her see that all the doling and shepherding and advising that still
pleased her fancy looked to him the merest temporary palliative, and
irretrievably tainted, even at that, with some vulgar feeling or other.
All that the well-to-do could do for the poor under the present state of
society was but a niggardly quit-rent; as for any relation of "superior"
and "inferior" in the business, or of any social desert attaching to
these precious efforts of the upper class to daub the gaps in the
ruinous social edifice for which they were themselves responsible, he
did not attempt to conceal his scorn. If you did not do these things, so
much the worse for you when the working class came to its own; if you
did do them, the burden of debt was hardly diminished, and the rope was
still left on your neck.

Now Marcella herself had on one or two occasions taken a malicious
pleasure in flaunting these doctrines, or some of them, under Miss
Raeburn's eyes. But somehow, as applied to herself, they were
disagreeable. Each of us is to himself a "special case"; and she saw the
other side. Hence a constant soreness of feeling; a constant recalling
of the argument to the personal point of view; and through it all a
curious growth of intimacy, a rubbing away of barriers. She had felt
herself of no account before, intellectually, in Aldous's company, as we
know. But then how involuntary on his part, and how counter-balanced by
that passionate idealism of his love, which glorified every pretty
impulse in her to the noblest proportions! Under Wharton's Socratic
method, she was conscious at times of the most wild and womanish
desires, worthy of her childhood--to cry, to go into a passion!--and
when they came to the village, and