The smile of Sir Willoughby waxed ever softer as the shakes of his head increased in contradictoriness.  “And yet,” said he, with the air of conceding a little after having answered the Rev. Doctor and convicted him of error, “Jack requires it to keep him in order.  On board ship your argument may apply.  Not, I suspect, among gentlemen.  No.”

“Good-night to you, gentlemen!” said Dr. Middleton.

Clara heard Miss Eleanor and Miss Isabel interchange remarks: 

“Willoughby would not have suffered it!”

“It would entirely have altered him!”

She sighed and put a tooth on her under-lip.  The gift of humourous fancy is in women fenced round with forbidding placards; they have to choke it; if they perceive a piece of humour, for instance, the young Willoughby grasped by his master,—­and his horrified relatives rigid at the sight of preparations for the seed of sacrilege, they have to blindfold the mind’s eye.  They are society’s hard-drilled soldiery.  Prussians that must both march and think in step.  It is for the advantage of the civilized world, if you like, since men have decreed it, or matrons have so read the decree; but here and there a younger woman, haply an uncorrected insurgent of the sex matured here and there, feels that her lot was cast with her head in a narrower pit than her limbs.

Clara speculated as to whether Miss Dale might be perchance a person of a certain liberty of mind.  She asked for some little, only some little, free play of mind in a house that seemed to wear, as it were, a cap of iron.  Sir Willoughby not merely ruled, he throned, he inspired:  and how?  She had noticed an irascible sensitiveness in him alert against a shadow of disagreement; and as he was kind when perfectly appeased, the sop was offered by him for submission.  She noticed that even Mr. Whitford forbore to alarm the sentiment of authority in his cousin.  If he did not breathe Sir Willoughby, like the ladies Eleanor and Isabel, he would either acquiesce in a syllable or be silent.  He never strongly dissented.  The habit of the house, with its iron cap, was on him, as it was on the servants, and would be, oh, shudders of the shipwrecked that see their end in drowning! on the wife.

“When do I meet Miss Dale?” she inquired.

“This very evening, at dinner,” replied Sir Willoughby.

Then, thought she, there is that to look forward to.

She indulged her morbid fit, and shut up her senses that she might live in the anticipation of meeting Miss Dale; and, long before the approach of the hour, her hope of encountering any other than another dull adherent of Sir Willoughby had fled.  So she was languid for two of the three minutes when she sat alone with Laetitia in the drawing-room before the rest had assembled.

“It is Miss Middleton?” Laetitia said, advancing to her.  “My jealousy tells me; for you have won my boy Crossjay’s heart, and done more to bring him to obedience in a few minutes than we have been able to do in months.”