have their pasture.  Since the lead is ours, the leaders must bow their heads to the sentence.  Jealousy of a woman is the primitive egoism seeking to refine in a blood gone to savagery under apprehension of an invasion of rights; it is in action the tiger threatened by a rifle when his paw is rigid on quick flesh; he tears the flesh for rage at the intruder.  The Egoist, who is our original male in giant form, had no bleeding victim beneath his paw, but there was the sex to mangle.  Much as he prefers the well-behaved among women, who can worship and fawn, and in whom terror can be inspired, in his wrath he would make of Beatrice a Lesbia Quadrantaria.

Let women tell us of their side of the battle.  We are not so much the test of the Egoist in them as they to us.  Movements of similarity shown in crowned and undiademed ladies of intrepid independence, suggest their occasional capacity to be like men when it is given to them to hunt.  At present they fly, and there is the difference.  Our manner of the chase informs them of the creature we are.

Dimly as young women are informed, they have a youthful ardour of detestation that renders them less tolerant of the Egoist than their perceptive elder sisters.  What they do perceive, however, they have a redoubtable grasp of, and Clara’s behaviour would be indefensible if her detective feminine vision might not sanction her acting on its direction.  Seeing him as she did, she turned from him and shunned his house as the antre of an ogre.  She had posted her letter to Lucy Darleton.  Otherwise, if it had been open to her to dismiss Colonel De Craye, she might, with a warm kiss to Vernon’s pupil, have seriously thought of the next shrill steam-whistle across yonder hills for a travelling companion on the way to her friend Lucy; so abhorrent was to her the putting of her horse’s head toward the Hall.  Oh, the breaking of bread there!  It had to be gone through for another day and more; that is to say, forty hours, it might be six-and-forty hours; and no prospect of sleep to speed any of them on wings!

Such were Clara’s inward interjections while poor Willoughby burned himself out with verdigris flame having the savour of bad metal, till the hollow of his breast was not unlike to a corroded old cuirass, found, we will assume, by criminal lantern-beams in a digging beside green-mantled pools of the sullen soil, lumped with a strange adhesive concrete.  How else picture the sad man?—­the cavity felt empty to him, and heavy; sick of an ancient and mortal combat, and burning; deeply dinted too: 

    With the starry hole
    Whence fled the soul: 

very sore; important for aught save sluggish agony; a specimen and the issue of strife.