Contemplating her situation, this idea (or vapour of youth taking the god-like semblance of an idea) sprang, born of her present sickness, in Clara’s mind; that it must be an ill-constructed tumbling world where the hour of ignorance is made the creator of our destiny by being forced to the decisive elections upon which life’s main issues hang.  Her teacher had brought her to contemplate his view of the world.

She thought likewise:  how must a man despise women, who can expose himself as he does to me!

Miss Middleton owed it to Sir Willoughby Patterne that she ceased to think like a girl.  When had the great change begun?  Glancing back, she could imagine that it was near the period we call in love the first—­almost from the first.  And she was led to imagine it through having become barred from imagining her own emotions of that season.  They were so dead as not to arise even under the form of shadows in fancy.  Without imputing blame to him, for she was reasonable so far, she deemed herself a person entrapped.  In a dream somehow she had committed herself to a life-long imprisonment; and, oh terror! not in a quiet dungeon; the barren walls closed round her, talked, called for ardour, expected admiration.

She was unable to say why she could not give it; why she retreated more and more inwardly; why she invoked the frost to kill her tenderest feelings.  She was in revolt, until a whisper of the day of bells reduced her to blank submission; out of which a breath of peace drew her to revolt again in gradual rapid stages, and once more the aspect of that singular day of merry blackness felled her to earth.  It was alive, it advanced, it had a mouth, it had a song.  She received letters of bridesmaids writing of it, and felt them as waves that hurl a log of wreck to shore.  Following which afflicting sense of antagonism to the whole circle sweeping on with her, she considered the possibility of her being in a commencement of madness.  Otherwise might she not be accused of a capriciousness quite as deplorable to consider?  She had written to certain of these young ladies not very long since of this gentleman—­how?—­in what tone?  And was it her madness then?—­her recovery now?  It seemed to her that to have written of him enthusiastically resembled madness more than to shudder away from the union; but standing alone, opposing all she has consented to set in motion, is too strange to a girl for perfect justification to be found in reason when she seeks it.

Sir Willoughby was destined himself to supply her with that key of special insight which revealed and stamped him in a title to fortify her spirit of revolt, consecrate it almost.