please a gentleman rather hard to please (except in a venerable
wine), an excuse would have been started for his visiting other houses, and he
had the response to his importunate daughter, that he believed an excellent
house was on view. Dr. Middleton had been prepared by numerous hints to meet
Clara's black misreading of a lover's quarrel, so that everything looked full of
promise as far as Willoughby's exercise of policy went.
    But the strange pang traversing him now convicted him of a large
adulteration of profitless temper with it. The loyalty of De Craye to a friend,
where a woman walked in the drama, was notorious. It was there, and a most
flexible thing it was: and it soon resembled reason manipulated by the sophists.
Not to have reckoned on his peculiar loyalty was proof of the blindness cast on
us by temper.
    And De Craye had an Irish tongue; and he had it under control, so that he
could talk good sense and airy nonsense at discretion. The strongest overboiling
of English Puritan contempt of a gabbler would not stop women from liking it.
Evidently Clara did like it, and Willoughby thundered on her sex. Unto such
brainless things as these do we, under the irony of circumstances, confide our
honour!
    For he was no gabbler. He remembered having rattled in earlier days; he had
rattled with an object to gain, desiring to be taken for an easy, careless,
vivacious, charming fellow, as any young gentleman may be who gaily wears the
golden dish of Fifty thousand pounds per annum nailed to the back of his very
saintly young pate. The growth of the critical spirit in him, however, had
informed him that slang had been a principal component of his rattling; and as
he justly supposed it a betraying art for his race and for him, he passed
through the prim and the yawning phases of affected indifference, to the pure
Puritanism of a leaden contempt of gabblers.
    They snare women, you see - girls! How despicable the host of girls! - at
least, that girl below there!
    Married women understood him: widows did. He placed an exceedingly handsome
and flattering young widow of his acquaintance, Lady Mary Lewison, beside Clara
for a comparison, involuntarily; and at once, in a flash, in despite of him (he
would rather it had been otherwise), and in despite of Lady Mary's high birth
and connections as well, the silver lustre of the maid sicklied the poor widow.
    The effect of the luckless comparison was to produce an image of
surpassingness in the features