Struck by the ridicule of his posture of expectation, and of his whole behaviour, he went to his bedroom suite, shut himself in, and paced the chambers, amazed at the creature he had become.  Agitated like the commonest of wretches, destitute of self-control, not able to preserve a decent mask, be, accustomed to inflict these emotions and tremours upon others, was at once the puppet and dupe of an intriguing girl.  His very stature seemed lessened.  The glass did not say so, but the shrunken heart within him did, and wailfully too.  Her compunction—­’Call me anything but good’—­coming after her return to the Hall beside De Craye, and after the visible passage of a secret between them in his presence, was a confession:  it blew at him with the fury of a furnace-blast in his face.  Egoist agony wrung the outcry from him that dupery is a more blessed condition.  He desired to be deceived.

He could desire such a thing only in a temporary transport; for above all he desired that no one should know of his being deceived; and were he a dupe the deceiver would know it, and her accomplice would know it, and the world would soon know of it:  that world against whose tongue he stood defenceless.  Within the shadow of his presence he compressed opinion, as a strong frost binds the springs of earth, but beyond it his shivering sensitiveness ran about in dread of a stripping in a wintry atmosphere.  This was the ground of his hatred of the world:  it was an appalling fear on behalf of his naked eidolon, the tender infant Self swaddled in his name before the world, for which he felt as the most highly civilized of men alone can feel, and which it was impossible for him to stretch out hands to protect.  There the poor little loveable creature ran for any mouth to blow on; and frostnipped and bruised, it cried to him, and he was of no avail!  Must we not detest a world that so treats us?  We loathe it the more, by the measure of our contempt for them, when we have made the people within the shadow-circle of our person slavish.

And he had been once a young prince in popularity:  the world had been his possession.  Clara’s treatment of him was a robbery of land and subjects.  His grander dream had been a marriage with a lady of so glowing a fame for beauty and attachment to her lord that the world perforce must take her for witness to merits which would silence detraction and almost, not quite (it was undesireable), extinguish envy.  But for the nature of women his dream would have been realized.  He could not bring himself to denounce Fortune.  It had cost him a grievous pang to tell Horace De Craye he was lucky; he had been educated in the belief that Fortune specially prized and cherished little Willoughby:  hence of necessity his maledictions fell upon women, or he would have forfeited the last blanket of a dream warm as poets revel in.