Clara read the letter very slowly, so that she might make herself sure
of its tone and bearing before she was called upon by her father to
express her feeling respecting it. She knew that she would be expected
to abuse it violently, and to accuse the writer of vulgarity,
insolence, and cruelty, but she had already learned that she must not
allow herself to accede to all her father's fantasies. For his sake,
and for his protection, it was necessary that she should differ from
him, and even contradict him. Were she not to do so, he would fall into
a state of wailing and complaining that would exaggerate itself almost
to idiotcy. And it was imperative that she herself should exercise her
own opinion on many points, almost without reference to him. She alone
knew how utterly destitute she would be when he should die. He, in the
first days of his agony, had sobbed forth his remorse as to her ruin;
but, even when doing so, he had comforted himself with the remembrance
of Miss Winterfield's money and Mrs Winterfield's affection for his
daughter. And the aunt, when she had declared her purpose to Clara, had
told herself that the provision made for Clara by her father was
sufficient. To neither of them had Clara told her own position. She
could not inform her aunt that her father had given up to the poor
reprobate who had destroyed himself all that had been intended for her.
Had she done so she would have been asking her aunt for charity. Nor
would she bring herself to add to her father's misery, by destroying
the hopes which still supported him. She never spoke of her own
position in regard to money, but she knew that it had become her duty
to live a wary, watchful life, taking much upon herself in their
impoverished household, and holding her own opinion against her
father's when her doing so became expedient. So she finished the letter
in silence, and did not speak at the moment when the movement of her
eyes declared that she had completed the task.