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.