turned away contemptuously; the material was
cheap, the mode vulgar. It must be borne with for the present, like other
indignities which she found to be inseparable from her position. As soon as her
employer's claim was satisfied, and the weekly five shillings began to be paid,
Clara remembered the promise she had volunteered to her father. But John was
once more at work; for the present there really seemed no need to give him any
of her money, and she herself, on the other hand, lacked so many things. This
dress plainly would not be suitable for the better kind of engagement she had in
view; it behoved her first of all to have one made in accordance with her own
taste. A mantle, too, a silk umbrella, gloves - It would be unjust to herself to
share her scanty earnings with those at home.
    Yes; but you must try to understand this girl of the people, with her
unfortunate endowment of brains and defect of tenderness. That smile of hers,
which touched and fascinated and made thoughtful, had of course a significance
discoverable by study of her life and character. It was no mere affectation; she
was not conscious, in smiling, of the expression upon her face. Moreover, there
was justice in the sense of wrong discernible upon her features when the very
self looked forth from them. All through his life John Hewett had suffered from
the same impulse of revolt; less sensitively constructed than his daughter,
uncalculating, inarticulate, he fumed and fretted away his energies in a
conflict with forces ludicrously personified. In the matter of his second
marriage he was seen at his best, generously defiant of social cruelties; but
self-knowledge was denied him, and circumstances condemned his life to futility.
Clara inherited his temperament; transferred to her more complex nature, it
gained in subtlety and in power of self-direction, but lost in its nobler
elements. Her mother was a capable and ambitious woman, one in whom active
characteristics were more prominent than the emotional. With such parents, every
probability told against her patient acceptance of a lot which allowed her
faculties no scope. And the circumstances of her childhood were such as added a
peculiar bitterness to the trials waiting upon her maturity.
    Clara, you remember, had reached her eleventh year when her father's brother
died and left the legacy of which came so little profit. That was in 1873. State
education had recently made a show of establishing itself, and in the Hewetts'
world much argument was going on with reference to the new Board schools, and
their advantages