obedient to her mother (Adrian called them Mrs. Doria Battledoria and the
fair Shuttlecockiana), and her mother accepted in this blind obedience
the text of her entire character. It is difficult for those who think
very earnestly for their children to know when their children are
thinking on their own account. The exercise of their volition we
construe as revolt. Our love does not like to be invalided and deposed
from its command, and here I think yonder old thrush on the lawn who has
just kicked the last of her lank offspring out of the nest to go shift
for itself, much the kinder of the two, though sentimental people do
shrug their shoulders at these unsentimental acts of the creatures who
never wander from nature. Now, excess of obedience is, to one who
manages most exquisitely, as bad as insurrection. Happily Mrs. Doria saw
nothing in her daughter's manner save a want of iron. Her pallor, her
lassitude, the tremulous nerves in her face, exhibited an imperious
requirement of the mineral.

"The reason why men and women are mysterious to us, and prove
disappointing," we learn from The Pilgrim's Scrip, "is, that we will read
them from our own book; just as we are perplexed by reading ourselves
from theirs."

Mrs. Doria read her daughter from her own book, and she was gay; she
laughed with Adrian at the breakfast-table, and mock-seriously joined in
his jocose assertion that Clare was positively and by all hymeneal
auspices betrothed to the owner of that ring, be he who he may, and must,
whenever he should choose to come and claim her, give her hand to him
(for everybody agreed the owner must be masculine, as no woman would drop
a wedding-ring), and follow him whither he listed all the world over.
Amiable giggling Forey girls called Clare, The Betrothed. Dark man, or
fair? was mooted. Adrian threw off the first strophe of Clare's fortune