Yes; but you must try to understand this girl of the people, with her unfortunate endowment of brains and defect of tenderness.  That smile of hers, which touched and fascinated and made thoughtful, had of course a significance discoverable by study of her life and character.  It was no mere affectation; she was not conscious, in smiling, of the expression upon her face.  Moreover, there was justice in the sense of wrong discernible upon her features when the very self looked forth from them.  All through his life John Hewett had suffered from the same impulse of revolt; less sensitively constructed than his daughter, uncalculating, inarticulate, he fumed and fretted away his energies in a conflict with forces ludicrously personified.  In the matter of his second marriage he was seen at his best, generously defiant of social cruelties; but self-knowledge was denied him, and circumstances condemned his life to futility.  Clara inherited his temperament; transferred to her more complex nature, it gained in subtlety and in power of self-direction, but lost in its nobler elements.  Her mother was a capable and ambitious woman, one in whom active characteristics were more prominent than the emotional.  With such parents, every probability told against her patient acceptance of a lot which allowed her faculties no scope.  And the circumstances of her childhood were such as added a peculiar bitterness to the trials waiting upon her maturity.

Clara, you remember, had reached her eleventh year when her father’s brother died and left the legacy of which came so little profit.  That was in 1878.  State education had recently made a show of establishing itself, and in the Hewetts’ world much argument was going on with reference to the new Board schools, and their advantages or disadvantages when compared with those in which working-folk’s children had hitherto been taught.  Clara went to a Church school, and the expense was greater than the new system rendered necessary.  Her father’s principles naturally favoured education on an independent basis, but a prejudice then (and still) common among workpeople of decent habits made him hesitate about sending his girl to sit side by side with the children of the street; and he was confirmed by Clara’s own view of the matter.  She spoke with much contempt of Board schools, and gave it to be understood that her religious convictions would not suffer her to be taught by those who made light of orthodoxy This attitude was intelligible enough in a child of sharp wit and abundant self-esteem.  Notwithstanding her father’s indifferentism, little Clara perceived that a regard for religion gave her a certain distinction at home, and elsewhere placed her apart from ’common girls.’  She was subject also to special influences:  on the one hand, from her favourite teacher, Miss Harrop; on the other, from a school-friend, Grace Rudd.