He bowed indulgently.

“I am afraid we can’t do it for you in England, my Clara.”

“No.”

“And I like the farm,” said he.  “But I think our drawing-rooms have a better atmosphere off the garden.  As to our peasantry, we cannot, I apprehend, modify our class demarcations without risk of disintegrating the social structure.”

“Perhaps.  I proposed nothing.”

“My love, I would entreat you to propose if I were convinced that I could obey.”

“You are very good.”

“I find my merit nowhere but in your satisfaction.”

Although she was not thirsting for dulcet sayings, the peacefulness of other than invitations to the exposition of his mysteries and of their isolation in oneness, inspired her with such calm that she beat about in her brain, as if it were in the brain, for the specific injury he had committed.  Sweeping from sensation to sensation, the young, whom sensations impel and distract, can rarely date their disturbance from a particular one; unless it be some great villain injury that has been done; and Clara had not felt an individual shame in his caress; the shame of her sex was but a passing protest, that left no stamp.  So she conceived she had been behaving cruelly, and said, “Willoughby”; because she was aware of the omission of his name in her previous remarks.

His whole attention was given to her.

She had to invent the sequel.  “I was going to beg you, Willoughby, do not seek to spoil me.  You compliment me.  Compliments are not suited to me.  You think too highly of me.  It is nearly as bad as to be slighted.  I am . . .  I am a . . .”  But she could not follow his example; even as far as she had gone, her prim little sketch of herself, set beside her real, ugly, earnest feelings, rang of a mincing simplicity, and was a step in falseness.  How could she display what she was?

“Do I not know you?” he said.

The melodious bass notes, expressive of conviction on that point, signified as well as the words that no answer was the right answer.  She could not dissent without turning his music to discord, his complacency to amazement.  She held her tongue, knowing that he did not know her, and speculating on the division made bare by their degrees of the knowledge, a deep cleft.

He alluded to friends in her neighbourhood and his own.  The bridesmaids were mentioned.

“Miss Dale, you will hear from my aunt Eleanor, declines, on the plea of indifferent health.  She is rather a morbid person, with all her really estimable qualities.  It will do no harm to have none but young ladies of your own age; a bouquet of young buds:  though one blowing flower among them . . .  However, she has decided.  My principal annoyance has been Vernon’s refusal to act as my best man.”

“Mr. Whitford refuses?”

“He half refuses.  I do not take no from him.  His pretext is a dislike to the ceremony.”