rial 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 1878. State education had recently made a show of establishing
itself, and in the Hewetts' world much