She went to her window to gaze at the first colour along the grey.  Small satisfaction came of gazing at that or at herself.  She shunned glass and sky.  One and the other stamped her as a slave in a frame.  It seemed to her she had been so long in this place that she was fixed here:  it was her world, and to imagine an Alp was like seeking to get back to childhood.  Unless a miracle intervened here she would have to pass her days.  Men are so little chivalrous now that no miracle ever intervenes.  Consequently she was doomed.

She took a pen and began a letter to a dear friend, Lucy Darleton, a promised bridesmaid, bidding her countermand orders for her bridal dress, and purposing a tour in Switzerland.  She wrote of the mountain country with real abandonment to imagination.  It became a visioned loophole of escape.  She rose and clasped a shawl over her night-dress to ward off chillness, and sitting to the table again, could not produce a word.  The lines she had written were condemned:  they were ludicrously inefficient.  The letter was torn to pieces.  She stood very clearly doomed.

After a fall of tears, upon looking at the scraps, she dressed herself, and sat by the window and watched the blackbird on the lawn as he hopped from shafts of dewy sunlight to the long-stretched dewy tree-shadows, considering in her mind that dark dews are more meaningful than bright, the beauty of the dews of woods more sweet than meadow-dews.  It signified only that she was quieter.  She had gone through her crisis in the anticipation of it.  That is how quick natures will often be cold and hard, or not much moved, when the positive crisis arrives, and why it is that they are prepared for astonishing leaps over the gradations which should render their conduct comprehensible to us, if not excuseable.  She watched the blackbird throw up his head stiffly, and peck to right and left, dangling the worm on each side his orange beak.  Specklebreasted thrushes were at work, and a wagtail that ran as with Clara’s own rapid little steps.  Thrush and blackbird flew to the nest.  They had wings.  The lovely morning breathed of sweet earth into her open window, and made it painful, in the dense twitter, chirp, cheep, and song of the air, to resist the innocent intoxication.  O to love! was not said by her, but if she had sung, as her nature prompted, it would have been.  Her war with Willoughby sprang of a desire to love repelled by distaste.  Her cry for freedom was a cry to be free to love:  she discovered it, half shuddering:  to love, oh! no—­no shape of man, nor impalpable nature either:  but to love unselfishness, and helpfulness, and planted strength in something.  Then, loving and being loved a little, what strength would be hers!  She could utter all the words needed to Willoughby and to her father, locked in her love:  walking in this world, living in that.