Miss Middleton bore it well, for she was sure that he meant well.  Bearing so well what was distasteful to her, she became less well able to bear what she had merely noted in observation before; his view of scholarship; his manner toward Mr. Vernon Whitford, of whom her father spoke warmly; the rumour concerning his treatment of a Miss Dale.  And the country tale of Constantia Durham sang itself to her in a new key.  He had no contempt for the world’s praises.  Mr. Whitford wrote the letters to the county paper which gained him applause at various great houses, and he accepted it, and betrayed a tingling fright lest he should be the victim of a sneer of the world he contemned.  Recollecting his remarks, her mind was afflicted by the “something illogical” in him that we readily discover when our natures are no longer running free, and then at once we yearn for a disputation.  She resolved that she would one day, one distant day, provoke it—­upon what?  The special point eluded her.  The world is too huge a client, and too pervious, too spotty, for a girl to defend against a man.  That “something illogical” had stirred her feelings more than her intellect to revolt.  She could not constitute herself the advocate of Mr. Whitford.  Still she marked the disputation for an event to come.

Meditating on it, she fell to picturing Sir Willoughby’s face at the first accents of his bride’s decided disagreement with him.  The picture once conjured up would not be laid.  He was handsome; so correctly handsome, that a slight unfriendly touch precipitated him into caricature.  His habitual air of happy pride, of indignant contentment rather, could easily be overdone.  Surprise, when he threw emphasis on it, stretched him with the tall eyebrows of a mask—­limitless under the spell of caricature; and in time, whenever she was not pleased by her thoughts, she had that, and not his likeness, for the vision of him.  And it was unjust, contrary to her deeper feelings; she rebuked herself, and as much as her naughty spirit permitted, she tried to look on him as the world did; an effort inducing reflections upon the blessings of ignorance.  She seemed to herself beset by a circle of imps, hardly responsible for her thoughts.

He outshone Mr. Whitford in his behaviour to young Crossjay.  She had seen him with the boy, and he was amused, indulgent, almost frolicsome, in contradistinction to Mr. Whitford’s tutorly sharpness.  He had the English father’s tone of a liberal allowance for boys’ tastes and pranks, and he ministered to the partiality of the genus for pocket-money.  He did not play the schoolmaster, like bookworms who get poor little lads in their grasp.