He had actually, in this parabolic, and commendable, obscureness, for which she thanked him in her soul, struck the very point she had not named and did not wish to hear named, but wished him to strike; he was anything but obtuse.  His exultation, of the compressed sort, was extreme, on hearing her cry out: 

“Young ladies may be.  Oh! not I, not I. I can convince you.  Not that.  Believe me, Willoughby.  I do not know what it is to feel that, or anything like it.  I cannot conceive a claim on any one’s life—­as a claim:  or the continuation of an engagement not founded on perfect, perfect sympathy.  How should I feel it, then?  It is, as you say of Mr. Ox—­Whitford, beyond me.”

Sir Willoughby caught up the Ox—­Whitford.

Bursting with laughter in his joyful pride, he called it a portrait of old Vernon in society.  For she thought a trifle too highly of Vernon, as here and there a raw young lady does think of the friends of her plighted man, which is waste of substance properly belonging to him, as it were, in the loftier sense, an expenditure in genuflexions to wayside idols of the reverence she should bring intact to the temple.  Derision instructs her.

Of the other subject—­her jealousy—­he had no desire to hear more.  She had winced:  the woman had been touched to smarting in the girl:  enough.  She attempted the subject once, but faintly, and his careless parrying threw her out.  Clara could have bitten her tongue for that reiterated stupid slip on the name of Whitford; and because she was innocent at heart she persisted in asking herself how she could be guilty of it.

“You both know the botanic titles of these wild flowers,” she said.

“Who?” he inquired.

“You and Miss Dale.”

Sir Willoughby shrugged.  He was amused.

“No woman on earth will grace a barouche so exquisitely as my Clara.”

“Where?” said she.

“During our annual two months in London.  I drive a barouche there, and venture to prophesy that my equipage will create the greatest excitement of any in London.  I see old Horace De Craye gazing!”

She sighed.  She could not drag him to the word, or a hint of it necessary to her subject.

But there it was; she saw it.  She had nearly let it go, and blushed at being obliged to name it.

“Jealousy, do you mean.  Willoughby? the people in London would be jealous?—­Colonel De Craye?  How strange!  That is a sentiment I cannot understand.”

Sir Willoughby gesticulated the “Of course not” of an established assurance to the contrary.

“Indeed, Willoughby, I do not.”

“Certainly not.”

He was now in her trap.  And he was imagining himself to be anatomizing her feminine nature.