Previously she had cried, despairing:  If I were loved!  Jealousy of Constantia’s happiness, envy of her escape, ruled her then:  and she remembered the cry, though not perfectly her plain-speaking to herself:  she chose to think she had meant:  If Willoughby were capable of truly loving!  For now the fire of her brain had sunk, and refuges and subterfuges were round about it.  The thought of personal love was encouraged, she chose to think, for the sake of the strength it lent her to carve her way to freedom.  She had just before felt rather the reverse, but she could not exist with that feeling; and it was true that freedom was not so indistinct in her fancy as the idea of love.

Were men, when they were known, like him she knew too well?

The arch-tempter’s question to her was there.

She put it away.  Wherever she turned it stood observing her.  She knew so much of one man, nothing of the rest:  naturally she was curious.  Vernon might be sworn to be unlike.  But he was exceptional.  What of the other in the house?

Maidens are commonly reduced to read the masters of their destinies by their instincts; and when these have been edged by over-activity they must hoodwink their maidenliness to suffer themselves to read; and then they must dupe their minds, else men would soon see they were gifted to discern.  Total ignorance being their pledge of purity to men, they have to expunge the writing of their perceptives on the tablets of the brain:  they have to know not when they do know.  The instinct of seeking to know, crossed by the task of blotting knowledge out, creates that conflict of the natural with the artificial creature to which their ultimately revealed double-face, complained of by ever-dissatisfied men, is owing.  Wonder in no degree that they indulge a craving to be fools, or that many of them act the character.  Jeer at them as little for not showing growth.  You have reared them to this pitch, and at this pitch they have partly civilized you.  Supposing you to want it done wholly, you must yield just as many points in your requisitions as are needed to let the wits of young women reap their due harvest and be of good use to their souls.  You will then have a fair battle, a braver, with better results.

Clara’s inner eye traversed Colonel De Craye at a shot.

She had immediately to blot out the vision of Captain Oxford in him, the revelation of his laughing contempt for Willoughby, the view of mercurial principles, the scribbled histories of light love-passages.

She blotted it out, kept it from her mind:  so she knew him, knew him to be a sweeter and a variable Willoughby, a generous kind of Willoughby, a Willoughby-butterfly, without having the free mind to summarize him and picture him for a warning.  Scattered features of him, such as the instincts call up, were not sufficiently impressive.  Besides, the clouded mind was opposed to her receiving impressions.