utation. She resolved that she
would one day, one distant day, provoke it--upon what? The special
point eluded her. The world is too huge a client, and too pervious, too
spotty, for a girl to defend against a man. That "something illogical"
had stirred her feelings more than her intellect to revolt. She could
not constitute herself the advocate of Mr. Whitford. Still she marked
the disputation for an event to come.

Meditating on it, she fell to picturing Sir Willoughby's face at the
first accents of his bride's decided disagreement with him. The
picture once conjured up would not be laid. He was handsome; so
correctly handsome, that a slight unfriendly touch precipitated him
into caricature. His habitual air of happy pride, of indignant
contentment rather, could easily be overdone. Surprise, when he threw
emphasis on it, stretched him with the tall eyebrows of a
mask--limitless under the spell of caricature; and in time, whenever
she was not pleased by her thoughts, she had that, and not his
likeness, for the vision of him. And it was unjust, contrary to her
deeper feelings; she rebuked herself, and as much as her naughty spirit
permitted, she tried to look on him as the world did; an effort
inducing reflections upon the blessings of ignorance. She seemed to
herself beset by a circle of imps, hardly responsible for her thoughts.

He outshone Mr. Whitford in his behaviour to young Crossjay. She had
seen him with the boy, and he was amused, indulgent, almost frolicsome,
in contradistinction to Mr. Whitford's tutorly sharpness. He had the
English father's tone of a liberal allowance for boys' tastes and
pranks, and he ministered to the partiality of the genus for
pocket-money. He did not play the schoolmaster, like bookworms who get
poor little lads in their grasp.

Mr. Whitford avoided her very much. He came to Upton Park on a visit to
her father, and she was not particularly sorry that she saw him only at
table. He treated her by fits to a level scrutiny of deep-set eyes
unpleasantly penetrating. She had liked his eyes. They became
unbearable; they dwelt in the memory as if they had left a
phosphorescent line. She had been taken by playmate boys in her infancy
to peep into hedge-leaves, where the mother-bird brooded on the nest;
and the eyes of the bird in that marvellous dark thickset home, had
sent her away with worlds of fancy. Mr. Whitford's gaze revived her
susceptibility, but not the old happy wondering. She wa