“Nevertheless, my dear Mrs. Mountstuart, I can assure you that conversing with you has much the same exhilarating effect on me as conversing with Miss Dale.”

“But, leafage! leafage!  You hard bargainers have no compassion for devoted spinsters.”

“I tell you my sentiments absolutely.”

“And you have mine moderately expressed.”

She recollected the purpose of her morning’s visit, which was to engage Dr. Middleton to dine with her, and Sir Willoughby conducted her to the library-door.  “Insist,” he said.

Awaiting her reappearance, the refreshment of the talk he had sustained, not without point, assisted him to distinguish in its complete abhorrent orb the offence committed against him by his bride.  And this he did through projecting it more and more away from him, so that in the outer distance it involved his personal emotions less, while observation was enabled to compass its vastness, and, as it were, perceive the whole spherical mass of the wretched girl’s guilt impudently turning on its axis.

Thus to detach an injury done to us, and plant it in space, for mathematical measurement of its weight and bulk, is an art; it may also be an instinct of self-preservation; otherwise, as when mountains crumble adjacent villages are crushed, men of feeling may at any moment be killed outright by the iniquitous and the callous.  But, as an art, it should be known to those who are for practising an art so beneficent, that circumstances must lend their aid.  Sir Willoughby’s instinct even had sat dull and crushed before his conversation with Mrs. Mountstuart.  She lifted him to one of his ideals of himself.  Among gentlemen he was the English gentleman; with ladies his aim was the Gallican courtier of any period from Louis Treize to Louis Quinze.  He could doat on those who led him to talk in that character—­backed by English solidity, you understand.  Roast beef stood eminent behind the souffle and champagne.  An English squire excelling his fellows at hazardous leaps in public, he was additionally a polished whisperer, a lively dialoguer, one for witty bouts, with something in him—­capacity for a drive and dig or two—­beyond mere wit, as they soon learned who called up his reserves, and had a bosom for pinking.  So much for his ideal of himself.  Now, Clara not only never evoked, never responded to it, she repelled it; there was no flourishing of it near her.  He considerately overlooked these facts in his ordinary calculations; he was a man of honour and she was a girl of beauty; but the accidental blooming of his ideal, with Mrs. Mountstuart, on the very heels of Clara’s offence, restored him to full command of his art of detachment, and he thrust her out, quite apart from himself, to contemplate her disgraceful revolutions.

Deeply read in the Book of Egoism that he was, he knew the wisdom of the sentence:  An injured pride that strikes not out will strike home.  What was he to strike with?  Ten years younger, Laetitia might have been the instrument.  To think of her now was preposterous.  Beside Clara she had the hue of Winter under the springing bough.  He tossed her away, vexed to the very soul by an ostentatious decay that shrank from comparison with the blooming creature he had to scourge in self-defence, by some agency or other.