CHAPTER XVI

CLARA AND LAETITIA

In spite of his honourable caution, Vernon had said things to render Miss Middleton more angrily determined than she had been in the scene with Sir Willoughby.  His counting on pitched battles and a defeat for her in all of them, made her previous feelings appear slack in comparison with the energy of combat now animating her.  And she could vehemently declare that she had not chosen; she was too young, too ignorant to choose.  He had wrongly used that word; it sounded malicious; and to call consenting the same in fact as choosing was wilfully unjust.  Mr. Whitford meant well; he was conscientious, very conscientious.  But he was not the hero descending from heaven bright-sworded to smite a woman’s fetters of her limbs and deliver her from the yawning mouth-abyss.

His logical coolness of expostulation with her when she cast aside the silly mission entrusted to her by Sir Willoughby and wept for herself, was unheroic in proportion to its praiseworthiness.  He had left it to her to do everything she wished done, stipulating simply that there should be a pause of four-and-twenty hours for her to consider of it before she proceeded in the attempt to extricate herself.  Of consolation there had not been a word.  Said he, “I am the last man to give advice in such a case”.  Yet she had by no means astonished him when her confession came out.  It came out, she knew not how.  It was led up to by his declining the idea of marriage, and her congratulating him on his exemption from the prospect of the yoke, but memory was too dull to revive the one or two fiery minutes of broken language when she had been guilty of her dire misconduct.

This gentleman was no flatterer, scarcely a friend.  He could look on her grief without soothing her.  Supposing he had soothed her warmly?  All her sentiments collected in her bosom to dash in reprobation of him at the thought.  She nevertheless condemned him for his excessive coolness; his transparent anxiety not to be compromised by a syllable; his air of saying, “I guessed as much, but why plead your case to me?” And his recommendation to her to be quite sure she did know what she meant, was a little insulting.  She exonerated him from the intention; he treated her as a girl.  By what he said of Miss Dale, he proposed that lady for imitation.

“I must be myself or I shall be playing hypocrite to dig my own pitfall,” she said to herself, while taking counsel with Laetitia as to the route for their walk, and admiring a becoming curve in her companion’s hat.

Sir Willoughby, with many protestations of regret that letters of business debarred him from the pleasure of accompanying them, remarked upon the path proposed by Miss Dale, “In that case you must have a footman.”

“Then we adopt the other,” said Clara, and they set forth.

“Sir Willoughby,” Miss Dale said to her, “is always in alarm about our unprotectedness.”