“Have you seen Mr. Whitford this morning?”

“He passed me.”

“Do not imagine him ever ill-tempered.”

“I had a governess, a learned lady, who taught me in person the picturesqueness of grumpiness.  Her temper was ever perfect, because she was never in the wrong, but I being so, she was grumpy.  She carried my iniquity under her brows, and looked out on me through it.  I was a trying child.”

Laetitia said, laughing:  “I can believe it!”

“Yet I liked her and she liked me:  we were a kind of foreground and background:  she threw me into relief and I was an apology for her existence.”

“You picture her to me.”

“She says of me now that I am the only creature she has loved.  Who knows that I may not come to say the same of her?”

“You would plague her and puzzle her still.”

“Have I plagued and puzzled Mr. Whitford?”

“He reminds you of her?”

“You said you had her picture.”

“Ah! do not laugh at him.  He is a true friend.”

“The man who can be a friend is the man who will presume to be a censor.”

“A mild one.”

“As to the sentence he pronounces, I am unable to speak, but his forehead is Rhadamanthine condemnation.”

“Dr Middleton!”

Clara looked round.  “Who?  I?  Did you hear an echo of papa?  He would never have put Rhadamanthus over European souls, because it appears that Rhadamanthus judged only the Asiatic; so you are wrong, Miss Dale.  My father is infatuated with Mr. Whitford.  What can it be?  We women cannot sound the depths of scholars, probably because their pearls have no value in our market; except when they deign to chasten an impertinent; and Mr. Whitford stands aloof from any notice of small fry.  He is deep, studious, excellent; and does it not strike you that if he descended among us he would be like a Triton ashore?”

Laetitia’s habit of wholly subservient sweetness, which was her ideal of the feminine, not yet conciliated with her acuter character, owing to the absence of full pleasure from her life—­the unhealed wound she had sustained and the cramp of a bondage of such old date as to seem iron—­induced her to say, as if consenting:  “You think he is not quite at home in society?” But she wished to defend him strenuously, and as a consequence she had to quit the self-imposed ideal of her daily acting, whereby—­the case being unwonted, very novel to her—­the lady’s intelligence became confused through the process that quickened it; so sovereign a method of hoodwinking our bright selves is the acting of a part, however naturally it may come to us! and to this will each honest autobiographical member of the animated world bear witness.