‘What has she been saying?’

‘I shan’t repeat it.’

As he gazed at her, the haggardness of her countenance smote like a sword-edge through all the black humours about his heart, piercing the very core of love and pity.  He spoke in a voice of passionate appeal.

’Clara, come home before it is too late!  Come with me—­now—­come at once?  Thank heaven you have got out of that place!  Come home, and stay there quietly till we can find you something better.’

‘I’ll die rather than go home!’ was her answer, flung at him as if in hatred.  ’Tell my father that, and tell him anything else you like.  I want no one to take any thought for me; and I wouldn’t do as you wish, not to save my soul!’

How often, in passing along the streets, one catches a few phrases of discord such as this!  The poor can seldom command privacy; their scenes alike of tenderness and of anger must for the most part be enacted on the peopled ways.  It is one of their misfortunes, one of the many necessities which blunt feeling, which balk reconciliation, which enhance the risks of dialogue at best semi-articulate.

Clara, having uttered the rancour which had so long poisoned her mind, straightway crossed the street and entered the house where she was lodging.  She had just returned from making several applications for employment—­futile, as so many were likely to be, if she persevered in her search for a better place than the last.  The wages due to her for the present week she had of course sacrificed; her purchases of clothing—­essential and superfluous—­had left only a small sum out of her earnings.  Food, fortunately, would cost her little; the difficulty, indeed, was to eat anything at all.

She was exhausted after her long walk, and the scene with Sidney had made her tremulous.  In thrusting open the windows, as soon as she entered, she broke a pane which was already cracked; the glass cut into her palm, and blood streamed forth.  For a moment she watched the red drops falling to the floor, then began to sob miserably, almost as a child might have done.  The exertion necessary for binding the wound seemed beyond her strength; sobbing and moaning, she stood in the same attitude until the blood began to congeal.  The tears, too, she let dry unneeded upon her eyelashes and her cheeks; the mist with which for a time they obscured her vision was nothing amid that cloud of misery which blackened about her spirit as she brooded.  The access of self-pity was followed, as always, by a persistent sense of intolerable wrong, and that again by a fierce desire to plunge herself into ruin, as though by such act she could satiate her instincts of defiance.  It is a phase of exasperated egotism common enough in original natures frustrated by circumstance—­never so pronounced as in those who suffer from the social disease.  Such mood perverts everything to cause of bitterness.  The very force of sincerity, which Clara could not