Mother and daughter had never spoken explicitly of Richard.  Mrs. Doria, by exquisite management, had contrived to be sure that on one side there would be no obstacle to her project of general happiness, without, as she thought, compromising her daughter’s feelings unnecessarily.  It could do no harm to an obedient young girl to hear that there was no youth in the world like a certain youth.  He the prince of his generation, she might softly consent, when requested, to be his princess; and if never requested (for Mrs. Doria envisaged failure), she might easily transfer her softness to squires of lower degree.  Clare had always been blindly obedient to her mother (Adrian called them Mrs. Doria Battledoria and the fair Shuttlecockiana), and her mother accepted in this blind obedience the text of her entire character.  It is difficult for those who think very earnestly for their children to know when their children are thinking on their own account.  The exercise of their volition we construe as revolt.  Our love does not like to be invalided and deposed from its command, and here I think yonder old thrush on the lawn who has just kicked the last of her lank offspring out of the nest to go shift for itself, much the kinder of the two, though sentimental people do shrug their shoulders at these unsentimental acts of the creatures who never wander from nature.  Now, excess of obedience is, to one who manages most exquisitely, as bad as insurrection.  Happily Mrs. Doria saw nothing in her daughter’s manner save a want of iron.  Her pallor, her lassitude, the tremulous nerves in her face, exhibited an imperious requirement of the mineral.

“The reason why men and women are mysterious to us, and prove disappointing,” we learn from The Pilgrim’s Scrip, “is, that we will read them from our own book; just as we are perplexed by reading ourselves from theirs.”

Mrs. Doria read her daughter from her own book, and she was gay; she laughed with Adrian at the breakfast-table, and mock-seriously joined in his jocose assertion that Clare was positively and by all hymeneal auspices betrothed to the owner of that ring, be he who he may, and must, whenever he should choose to come and claim her, give her hand to him (for everybody agreed the owner must be masculine, as no woman would drop a wedding-ring), and follow him whither he listed all the world over.  Amiable giggling Forey girls called Clare, The Betrothed.  Dark man, or fair? was mooted.  Adrian threw off the first strophe of Clare’s fortune in burlesque rhymes, with an insinuating gipsy twang.  Her aunt Forey warned her to have her dresses in readiness.  Her grandpapa Forey pretended to grumble at bridal presents being expected from grandpapas.

This one smelt orange-flower, another spoke solemnly of an old shoe.  The finding of a wedding-ring was celebrated through all the palpitating accessories and rosy ceremonies involved by that famous instrument.  In the midst of the general hilarity, Clare showed her deplorable want of iron by bursting into tears.