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 every human creature, old and young, dropped its obsequious curtsey as they passed, she could first have beaten them for so degrading her, and the next moment felt a feverish pleasure in thus parading her petty power before a man who in his doctrinaire pedantry had no sense of poetry, or of the dear old natural relations of country life.

They went first to Mrs. Jellison’s, to whom Marcella wished to unfold her workshop scheme.

“Don’t let me keep you,” she said to Wharton coldly, as they neared the cottage; “I know you have to catch your train.”

Wharton consulted his watch.  He had to be at a local station some two miles off within an hour.

“Oh!  I have time,” he said.  “Do take me in, Miss Boyce.  I have made acquaintance with these people so far, as my constituents—­now show them to me as your subjects.  Besides, I am an observer.  I ‘collect’ peasants.  They are my study.”

“They are not my subjects, but my friends,” she said with the same stiffness.

They found Mrs. Jellison having her dinner.  The lively old woman was sitting close against her bit of fire, on her left a small deal table which held her cold potatoes and cold bacon; on her right a tiny window and window-sill whereon lay her coil of “plait” and the simple straw-splitting machine she had just been working.  When Marcella had taken the only other chair the hovel contained, nothing else remained for Wharton but to flatten himself as closely against the door as he might.