. Their merit is, that they have not the ambition. I am like
them. Now, Miss Middleton, I cannot make myself more bare to you. I hope you see
my sincerity.«
    »I do see it,« Clara said.
    With the second heaving of her heart, she cried: »See it, and envy you that
humility! proud if I could ape it! Oh! how proud if I could speak so truthfully
true! - You would not have spoken so to me without some good feeling out of
which friends are made. That I am sure of. To be very truthful to a person, one
must have a liking. So I judge by myself. Do I presume too much?«
    Kindness was Lætitia's face.
    »But now,« said Clara, swimming on the wave in her bosom, »I tax you with
the silliest suspicion ever entertained by one of your rank. Lady, you have
deemed me capable of the meanest of our vices! - Hold this hand, Lætitia, my
friend, will you? Something is going on in me.«
    Lætitia took her hand, and saw and felt that something was going on.
    Clara said: »You are a woman.«
    It was her effort to account for the something.
    She swam for a brilliant instant on tears, and yielded to the overflow.
    When they had fallen, she remarked upon her first long breath quite coolly;
»An encouraging picture of a rebel, is it not?«
    Her companion murmured to soothe her.
    »It's little, it's nothing,« said Clara, pained to keep her lips in line.
    They walked forward, holding hands, deep-hearted to one another.
    »I like this country better now,« the shaken girl resumed. »I could lie down
in it and ask only for sleep. I should like to think of you here. How nobly
self-respecting you must be, to speak as you did! Our dreams of heroes and
heroines are cold glitter beside the reality. I have been lately thinking of
myself as an outcast of my sex, and to have a good woman liking me a little ...
loving? Oh! Lætitia, my friend, I should have kissed you, and not made this
exhibition of myself - and if you call it hysterics, woe to you! for I bit my
tongue to keep it off when I had hardly strength to bring my teeth together - if
that idea of jealousy had not been in your head. You had it from him
