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
unthreshed. 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 your 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 underlip. 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
deed 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