He led her about the flower-beds; too much as if he were giving a convalescent an airing.  She chafed at it, and pricked herself with remorse.  In contrition she expatiated on the beauty of the garden.

“All is yours, my Clara.”

An oppressive load it seemed to her!  She passively yielded to the man in his form of attentive courtier; his mansion, estate, and wealth overwhelmed her.  They suggested the price to be paid.  Yet she recollected that on her last departure through the park she had been proud of the rolling green and spreading trees.  Poison of some sort must be operating in her.  She had not come to him to-day with this feeling of sullen antagonism; she had caught it here.

“You have been well, my Clara?”

“Quite.”

“Not a hint of illness?”

“None.”

“My bride must have her health if all the doctors in the kingdom die for it!  My darling!”

“And tell me:  the dogs?”

“Dogs and horses are in very good condition.”

“I am glad.  Do you know, I love those ancient French chateaux and farms in one, where salon windows look on poultry-yard and stalls.  I like that homeliness with beasts and peasants.”

He bowed indulgently.

“I am afraid we can’t do it for you in England, my Clara.”

“No.”

“And I like the farm,” said he.  “But I think our drawing-rooms have a better atmosphere off the garden.  As to our peasantry, we cannot, I apprehend, modify our class demarcations without risk of disintegrating the social structure.”

“Perhaps.  I proposed nothing.”

“My love, I would entreat you to propose if I were convinced that I could obey.”

“You are very good.”

“I find my merit nowhere but in your satisfaction.”

Although she was not thirsting for dulcet sayings, the peacefulness of other than invitations to the exposition of his mysteries and of their isolation in oneness, inspired her with such calm that she beat about in her brain, as if it were in the brain, for the specific injury he had committed.  Sweeping from sensation to sensation, the young, whom sensations impel and distract, can rarely date their disturbance from a particular one; unless it be some great villain injury that has been done; and Clara had not felt an individual shame in his caress; the shame of her sex was but a passing protest, that left no stamp.  So she conceived she had been behaving cruelly, and said, “Willoughby”; because she was aware of the omission of his name in her previous remarks.

His whole attention was given to her.

She had to invent the sequel.  “I was going to beg you, Willoughby, do not seek to spoil me.  You compliment me.  Compliments are not suited to me.  You think too highly of me.  It is nearly as bad as to be slighted.  I am . . .  I am a . . .”  But she could not follow his example; even as far as she had gone, her prim little sketch of herself, set beside her real, ugly, earnest feelings, rang of a mincing simplicity, and was a step in falseness.  How could she display what she was?