You hard bargainers have no compassion for devoted
spinsters.«
    »I tell you my sentiments absolutely.«
    »And you have mine moderately expressed.«
    She recollected the purpose of her morning's visit, which was to engage Dr.
Middleton to dine with her, and Sir Willoughby conducted her to the library
door. »Insist,« he said.
    Awaiting her reappearance, the refreshment of the talk he had sustained, not
without point, assisted him to distinguish in its complete abhorrent orb the
offence committed against him by his bride. And this he did through projecting
it more and more away from him, so that in the outer distance it involved his
personal emotions less, while observation was enabled to compass its vastness,
and, as it were, perceive the whole spherical mass of the wretched girl's guilt
impudently turning on its axis.
    Thus to detach an injury done to us, and plant it in space, for mathematical
measurement of its weight and bulk, is an art; it may also be an instinct of
self-preservation; otherwise, as when mountains crumble adjacent villages are
crushed, men of feeling may at any moment be killed outright by the iniquitous
and the callous. But, as an art, it should be known to those who are for
practising an art so beneficent, that circumstances must lend their aid. Sir
Willoughby's instinct even had sat dull and crushed before his conversation with
Mrs. Mountstuart. She lifted him to one of his ideals of himself. Among
gentlemen he was the English gentleman; with ladies his aim was the Gallican
courtier of any period from Louis Treize to Louis Quinze. He could doat on those
who led him to talk in that character - backed by English solidity, you
understand. Roast beef stood eminent behind the soufflé and champagne. An
English squire excelling his fellows at hazardous leaps in public, he was
additionally a polished whisperer, a lively dialoguer, one for witty bouts, with
something in him - capacity for a drive and dig or two - beyond mere wit, as
they soon learnt who called up his reserves, and had a bosom for pinking. So
much for his ideal of himself. Now, Clara not only never evoked, never responded
to it, she repelled it; there was no flourishing of it near her. He
considerately overlooked these facts in his ordinary calculations; he was a man
of honour and she was a girl of beauty; but the accidental blossoming of his
ideal, with Mrs. Mountstuart, on the very heels of Clara's offence, restored him
to full command of his art of