“Let’s see whether it fits,” said Mrs. Doria, almost infantine with surprise and pleasure.

Clare suffered her glove to be drawn off.  The ring slid down her long thin finger, and settled comfortably.

“It does!” Mrs. Doria whispered.  To find a wedding ring is open to any woman; but to find a wedding-ring that fits may well cause a superstitious emotion.  Moreover, that it should be found while walking in the neighbourhood of the identical youth whom a mother has destined for her daughter, gives significance to the gentle perturbation of ideas consequent on such a hint from Fortune.

“It really fits!” she pursued.  “Now I never pay any attention to the nonsense of omens and that kind of thing” (had the ring been a horseshoe Mrs. Doria would have pinked it up and dragged it obediently home), “but this, I must say, is odd—­to find a ring that fits!—­singular!  It never happened to me.  Sixpence is the most I ever discovered, and I have it now.  Mind you keep it, Clare—­this ring:  And,” she laughed, “offer it to Richard when he comes; say, you think he must have dropped it.”

The dimple in Clare’s cheek quivered.

Mother and daughter had never spoken explicitly of Richard.  Mrs. Doria, by exquisite management, had contrived to be sure that on one side there would be no obstacle to her project of general happiness, without, as she thought, compromising her daughter’s feelings unnecessarily.  It could do no harm to an obedient young girl to hear that there was no youth in the world like a certain youth.  He the prince of his generation, she might softly consent, when requested, to be his princess; and if never requested (for Mrs. Doria envisaged failure), she might easily transfer her softness to squires of lower degree.  Clare had always been blindly obedient to her mother (Adrian called them Mrs. Doria Battledoria and the fair Shuttlecockiana), and her mother accepted in this blind obedience the text of her entire character.  It is difficult for those who think very earnestly for their children to know when their children are thinking on their own account.  The exercise of their volition we construe as revolt.  Our love does not like to be invalided and deposed from its command, and here I think yonder old thrush on the lawn who has just kicked the last of her lank offspring out of the nest to go shift for itself, much the kinder of the two, though sentimental people do shrug their shoulders at these unsentimental acts of the creatures who never wander from nature.  Now, excess of obedience is, to one who manages most exquisitely, as bad as insurrection.  Happily Mrs. Doria saw nothing in her daughter’s manner save a want of iron.  Her pallor, her lassitude, the tremulous nerves in her face, exhibited an imperious requirement of the mineral.

“The reason why men and women are mysterious to us, and prove disappointing,” we learn from The Pilgrim’s Scrip, “is, that we will read them from our own book; just as we are perplexed by reading ourselves from theirs.”