"Jump, my dear!"
"He will?"
"When men love stale instead of fresh, withered better than blooming, excellence in the abstract rather than the palpable. With their idle prate of feminine intellect, and a grotto nymph, and a mother of Gracchi! Why, he must think me dazed with admiration of him to talk to me! One listens, you know. And he is one of the men who cast a kind of physical spell on you while he has you by the ear, until you begin to think of it by talking to somebody else. I suppose there are clever people who do see deep into the breast while dialogue is in progress. One reads of them. No, my dear, you have very cleverly managed to show him that it isn't at all possible: he can't. And the real cause for alarm, in my humble opinion, is lest your amiable foil should have been a trifle, as he would say, deceived, too much in earnest, led too far. One may reprove him for not being wiser, but men won't learn without groaning that they are simply weapons taken up to be put down when done with. Leave it to me to compose him.—Willoughby can't give you up. I'm certain he has tried; his pride has been horridly wounded. You were shrewd, and he has had his lesson. If these little rufflings don't come before marriage they come after; so it's not time lost; and it's good to be able to look back on them. You are very white, my child."
"Can you, Mrs. Mountstuart, can you think I would be so heartlessly treacherous?"
"Be honest, fair Middleton, and answer me: Can you say you had not a corner of an idea of producing an effect on Willoughby?"
Clara checked the instinct of her tongue to defend her reddening cheeks, with a sense that she was disintegrating and crumbling, but she wanted this lady for a friend, and she had to submit to the conditions, and be red and silent.
Mrs. Mountstuart examined her leisurely.
"That will do. Conscience blushes. One knows it by the conflagration.
Don't be hard on yourself . . . there you are in the other extreme.
That blush of yours would count with me against any quantity of
evidence—all the Crooklyns in the kingdom. You lost your purse."
"I discovered that it was lost this morning."
"Flitch has been here with it. Willoughby has it. You will ask him for it; he will demand payment: you will be a couple of yards' length or so of cramoisy: and there ends the episode, nobody killed, only a poor man melancholy-wounded, and I must offer him my hand to mend him, vowing to prove to him that Suttee was properly abolished. Well, and now to business. I said I wanted to sound you. You have been overdone with porcelain. Poor Lady Busshe is in despair at your disappointment. Now, I mean my wedding-present to be to your taste."