Sir Willoughby had positively said beware!  Marrying him would be a deed committed in spite of his express warning.  She went so far as to conceive him subsequently saying:  “I warned you.”  She conceived the state of marriage with him as that of a woman tied not to a man of heart, but to an obelisk lettered all over with hieroglyphics, and everlastingly hearing him expound them, relishing renewing his lectures on them.

Full surely this immovable stone-man would not release her.  This petrifaction of egoism would from amazedly to austerely refuse the petition.  His pride would debar him from understanding her desire to be released.  And if she resolved on it, without doing it straightway in Constantia’s manner, the miserable bewilderment of her father, for whom such a complication would be a tragic dilemma, had to be thought of.  Her father, with all his tenderness for his child, would make a stand on the point of honour; though certain to yield to her, he would be distressed in a tempest of worry; and Dr. Middleton thus afflicted threw up his arms, he shunned books, shunned speech, and resembled a castaway on the ocean, with nothing between himself and his calamity.  As for the world, it would be barking at her heels.  She might call the man she wrenched her hand from, Egoist; jilt, the world would call her.  She dwelt bitterly on her agreement with Sir Willoughby regarding the world, laying it to his charge that her garden had become a place of nettles, her horizon an unlighted fourth side of a square.

Clara passed from person to person visiting the Hall.  There was universal, and as she was compelled to see, honest admiration of the host.  Not a soul had a suspicion of his cloaked nature.  Her agony of hypocrisy in accepting their compliments as the bride of Sir Willoughby Patterne was poorly moderated by contempt of them for their infatuation.  She tried to cheat herself with the thought that they were right and that she was the foolish and wicked inconstant.  In her anxiety to strangle the rebelliousness which had been communicated from her mind to her blood, and was present with her whether her mind was in action or not, she encouraged the ladies Eleanor and Isabel to magnify the fictitious man of their idolatry, hoping that she might enter into them imaginatively, that she might to some degree subdue herself to the necessity of her position.  If she partly succeeded in stupefying her antagonism, five minutes of him undid the work.

He requested her to wear the Patterne pearls for a dinner-party of grand ladies, telling her that he would commission Miss Isabel to take them to her.  Clara begged leave to decline them, on the plea of having no right to wear them.  He laughed at her modish modesty.  “But really it might almost be classed with affectation,” said he.  “I give you the right.  Virtually you are my wife.”

“No.”

“Before heaven?”

“No.  We are not married.”