Ejaculating “Porcelain!” he uncrossed his legs; a signal for the ladies Eleanor and Isabel to retire.  Vernon bowed to Clara as she was rising.  He had not been once in her eyes, and he expected a partial recognition at the good-night.  She said it, turning her head to Miss Isabel, who was condoling once more with Colonel De Craye over the ruins of his wedding-present, the porcelain vase, which she supposed to have been in Willoughby’s mind when he displayed the signal.  Vernon walked off to his room, dark as one smitten blind:  bile tumet jecur:  her stroke of neglect hit him there where a blow sends thick obscuration upon eyeballs and brain alike.

Clara saw that she was paining him and regretted it when they were separated.  That was her real friend!  But he prescribed too hard a task.  Besides, she had done everything he demanded of her, except the consenting to stay where she was and wear out Willoughby, whose dexterity wearied her small stock of patience.  She had vainly tried remonstrance and supplication with her father hoodwinked by his host, she refused to consider how; through wine?—­the thought was repulsive.

Nevertheless, she was drawn to the edge of it by the contemplation of her scheme of release.  If Lucy Darleton was at home; if Lucy invited her to come:  if she flew to Lucy:  oh! then her father would have cause for anger.  He would not remember that but for hateful wine! . . .

What was there in this wine of great age which expelled reasonableness, fatherliness?  He was her dear father:  she was his beloved child:  yet something divided them; something closed her father’s ears to her:  and could it be that incomprehensible seduction of the wine?  Her dutifulness cried violently no.  She bowed, stupefied, to his arguments for remaining awhile, and rose clear-headed and rebellious with the reminiscence of the many strong reasons she had urged against them.

The strangeness of men, young and old, the little things (she regarded a grand wine as a little thing) twisting and changing them, amazed her.  And these are they by whom women are abused for variability!  Only the most imperious reasons, never mean trifles, move women, thought she.  Would women do an injury to one they loved for oceans of that—­ah, pah!

And women must respect men.  They necessarily respect a father.  “My dear, dear father!” Clara said in the solitude of her chamber, musing on all his goodness, and she endeavoured to reconcile the desperate sentiments of the position he forced her to sustain, with those of a venerating daughter.  The blow which was to fall on him beat on her heavily in advance.  “I have not one excuse!” she said, glancing at numbers and a mighty one.  But the idea of her father suffering at her hands cast her down lower than self-justification.  She sought to imagine herself sparing him.  It was too fictitious.

The sanctuary of her chamber, the pure white room so homely to her maidenly feelings, whispered peace, only to follow the whisper with another that went through her swelling to a roar, and leaving her as a suing of music unkindly smitten.  If she stayed in this house her chamber would no longer be a sanctuary.  Dolorous bondage!  Insolent death is not worse.  Death’s worm we cannot keep away, but when he has us we are numb to dishonour, happily senseless.