said Dr. Middleton, "and in this case we may admit the gardener's claim to be valid, though I believe that, with his gift of double blossom, he has improved away the fruit. Call this the Vestal of civilization, then; he has at least done something to vindicate the beauty of the office as well as the justness of the title."
"It is Vernon's Holy Tree the young rascal has been despoiling," said Sir Willoughby merrily.
Miss Middleton was informed that this double-blossom wild cherry-tree was worshipped by Mr. Whitford.
Sir Willoughby promised he would conduct her to it.
"You," he said to her, "can bear the trial; few complexions can; it is to most ladies a crueller test than snow. Miss Dale, for example, becomes old lace within a dozen yards of it. I should like to place her under the tree beside you."
"Dear me, though; but that is investing the hamadryad with novel and terrible functions," exclaimed Dr. Middleton.
Clara said: "Miss Dale could drag me into a superior Court to show me fading beside her in gifts more valuable than a complexion."
"She has a fine ability," said Vernon.
All the world knew, so Clara knew of Miss Dales romantic admiration of Sir Willoughby; she was curious to see Miss Dale and study the nature of a devotion that might be, within reason, imitable—for a man who could speak with such steely coldness of the poor lady he had fascinated? Well, perhaps it was good for the hearts of women to be beneath a frost; to be schooled, restrained, turned inward on their dreams. Yes, then, his coldness was desireable; it encouraged an ideal of him. It suggested and seemed to propose to Clara's mind the divineness of separation instead of the deadly accuracy of an intimate perusal. She tried to look on him as Miss Dale might look, and while partly despising her for the dupery she envied, and more than criticizing him for the inhuman numbness of sentiment which offered up his worshipper to point a complimentary comparison, she was able to imagine a distance whence it would be possible to observe him uncritically, kindly, admiringly; as the moon a handsome mortal, for example.
In the midst of her thoughts, she surprised herself by saying: "I certainly was difficult to instruct. I might see things clearer if I had a fine ability. I never remember to have been perfectly pleased with my immediate lesson . . ."
She stopped, wondering whither her tongue was leading her; then added, to save herself, "And that may be why I feel for poor Crossjay."
Mr. Whitford apparently did not think it remarkable that she should have been set off gabbling of "a fine ability", though the eulogistic phrase had been pronounced by him with an impressiveness to make his ear aware of an echo.
Sir Willoughby dispersed her vapourish confusion. "Exactly," he said. "I have insisted with Vernon, I don't know how often, that you must have the lad by his affections. He won't bear driving. It had no effect on me. Boys of spirit kick at it. I think I know boys, Clara."
He found himself addressing eyes that regarded him as though he were a small speck, a pin's head, in the circle of their remote contemplation. They were wide; they closed.
She opened them to gaze elsewhere.
He was very sensitive.
Even then, when knowingly wounding him, or because of it, she was trying to climb back to that altitude of the thin division of neutral ground, from which we see a lover's faults and are above them, pure surveyors. She climbed unsuccessfully, it is true; soon despairing and using the effort as a pretext to fall back lower.
Dr. Middleton withdrew Sir Willoughby's attention from the imperceptible annoyance. "No, sir, no: the birch! the birch! Boys of spirit commonly turn into solid men, and the solider the men the more surely do they vote for Busby. For me, I pray he may be immortal in Great Britain. Sea-air nor mountain-air is half so bracing. I venture to say that the power to take a licking is better worth having than the power to administer one. Horse him and birch him if Crossjay runs from his books."
"It is your opinion, sir?" his host bowed to him affably, shocked on behalf of the ladies.
"So positively so, sir, that I will undertake, without knowledge of their antecedents, to lay my finger on the men in public life who have not had early Busby. They are ill-balanced men. Their seat of reason is not a concrete. They won't take rough and smooth as they come. They make bad blood, can't forgive, sniff right and left for approbation, and are excited to anger if an East wind does not flatter them. Why, sir, when they have grown to be seniors, you find these men mixed up with the nonsense of their youth; you see they are unthrashed. We English beat the world because we take a licking well. I hold it for a surety of a proper sweetness of blood."
The smile of Sir Willoughby waxed ever softer as the shakes of his head increased in contradictoriness. "And yet," said he, with the air of conceding a little after having answered the Rev. Doctor and convicted him of error, "Jack requires it to keep him in order. On board ship your argument may apply. Not, I suspect, among gentlemen. No."
"Good-night to you, gentlemen!" said Dr. Middleton.
Clara heard Miss Eleanor and Miss Isabel interchange remarks:
"Willoughby would not have suffered it!"
"It would entirely have altered him!"
She sighed and put a tooth on her under-lip. The gift of humourous fancy is in women fenced round with forbidding placards; they have to choke it; if they perceive a piece of humour, for instance, the young Willoughby grasped by his master,—and his horrified relatives rigid at the sight of preparations for the seed of sacrilege, they have to blindfold the mind's eye. They are society's hard-drilled soldiery. Prussians that must both march and think in step. It is for the advantage of the civilized world, if you like, since men have decreed it, or matrons have so read the decree; but here and there a younger woman, haply an uncorrected insurgent of the sex matured here and there, feels that her lot was cast with her head in a narrower pit than her limbs.
Clara speculated as to whether Miss Dale might be perchance a person of a certain liberty of mind. She asked for some little, only some little, free play of mind in a house that seemed to wear, as it were, a cap of iron. Sir Willoughby not merely ruled, he throned, he inspired: and how? She had noticed an irascible sensitiveness in him alert against a shadow of disagreement; and as he was kind when perfectly appeased, the sop was offered by him for submission. She noticed that even Mr. Whitford forbore to alarm the sentiment of authority in his cousin. If he did not breathe Sir Willoughby, like the ladies Eleanor and Isabel, he would either acquiesce in a syllable or be silent. He never strongly dissented. The habit of the house, with its iron cap, was on him, as it was on the servants, and would be, oh, shudders of the shipwrecked that see their end in drowning! on the wife.
"When do I meet Miss Dale?" she inquired.
"This very evening, at dinner," replied Sir Willoughby.
Then, thought she, there is that to look forward to.
She indulged her morbid fit, and shut up her senses that she might live in the anticipation of meeting Miss Dale; and, long before the approach of the hour, her hope of encountering any other than another dull adherent of Sir Willoughby had fled. So she was languid for two of the three minutes when she sat alone with Laetitia in the drawing-room before the rest had assembled.
"It is Miss Middleton?" Laetitia said, advancing to her. "My jealousy tells me; for you have won my boy Crossjay's heart, and done more to bring him to obedience in a few minutes than we have been able to do in months."
"His wild flowers were so welcome to me," said Clara.
"He
