Mrs. Doria had her own reasons for being in a hurry.  She had discovered something of the strange impassive nature of her child; not from any confession of Clare’s, but from signs a mother can read when, her eyes are not resolutely shut.  She saw with alarm and anguish that Clare had fallen into the pit she had been digging for her so laboriously.  In vain she entreated the baronet to break the disgraceful, and, as she said, illegal alliance his son had contracted.  Sir Austin would not even stop the little pension to poor Berry.  “At least you will do that, Austin,” she begged pathetically.  “You will show your sense of that horrid woman’s conduct?” He refused to offer up any victim to console her.  Then Mrs. Doria told him her thoughts,—­and when an outraged energetic lady is finally brought to exhibit these painfully hoarded treasures, she does not use half words as a medium.  His System, and his conduct generally were denounced to him, without analysis.  She let him understand that the world laughed at him; and he heard this from her at a time when his mask was still soft and liable to be acted on by his nerves.  “You are weak, Austin! weak, I tell you!” she said, and, like all angry and self-interested people, prophecy came easy to her.  In her heart she accused him of her own fault, in imputing to him the wreck of her project.  The baronet allowed her to revel in the proclamation of a dire future, and quietly counselled her to keep apart from him, which his sister assured him she would do.

But to be passive in calamity is the province of no woman.  Mark the race at any hour.  “What revolution and hubbub does not that little instrument, the needle, avert from us!” says The Pilgrim’s Scrip.  Alas, that in calamity women cannot stitch!  Now that she saw Clare wanted other than iron, it struck her she must have a husband, and be made secure as a woman and a wife.  This seemed the thing to do:  and, as she had forced the iron down Clare’s throat, so she forced the husband, and Clare gulped at the latter as she had at the former.  On the very day that Mrs. Doria had this new track shaped out before her, John Todhunter called at the Foreys’.  “Old John!” sang out Mrs. Doria, “show him up to me.  I want to see him particularly.”  He sat with her alone.  He was a man multitudes of women would have married—­whom will they not?—­and who would have married any presentable woman:  but women do want asking, and John never had the word.  The rape of such men is left to the practical animal.  So John sat alone with his old flame.  He had become resigned to her perpetual lamentation and living Suttee for his defunct rival.  But, ha! what meant those soft glances now—­addressed to him?  His tailor and his hairdresser gave youth to John, but they had not the art to bestow upon him distinction, and an undistinguished man what woman looks at?  John was an indistinguishable man.  For that reason he was dry wood to a soft glance.

And now she said:  “It is time you should marry; and you are the man to be the guide and helper of a young woman, John.  You are well preserved—­younger than most of the young men of our day.  You are eminently domestic, a good son, and will be a good husband and good father.  Some one you must marry.—­What do you think of Clare for a wife for you?”