better appear inconsistent. Why should she not appear such as she was?

Why? We answer that question usually in angry reliance on certain
superb qualities, injured fine qualities of ours undiscovered by the
world, not much more than suspected by ourselves, which are still our
fortress, where pride sits at home, solitary and impervious as an
octogenarian conservative. But it is not possible to answer it so when
the brain is rageing like a pine-torch and the devouring illumination
leaves not a spot of our nature covert. The aspect of her weakness was
unrelieved, and frightened her back to her loathing. From her loathing,
as soon as her sensations had quickened to realize it, she was hurled
on her weakness. She was graceless, she was inconsistent, she was
volatile, she was unprincipled, she was worse than a prey to
wickedness--capable of it; she was only waiting to be misled. Nay, the
idea of being misled suffused her with languor; for then the battle
would be over and she a happy weed of the sea no longer suffering those
tugs at the roots, but leaving it to the sea to heave and contend. She
would be like Constantia then: like her in her fortunes: never so
brave, she feared.

Perhaps very like Constantia in her fortunes!

Poor troubled bodies waking up in the night to behold visually the
spectre cast forth from the perplexed machinery inside them, stare at
it for a space, till touching consciousness they dive down under the
sheets with fish-like alacrity. Clara looked at her thought, and
suddenly headed downward in a crimson gulf.

She must have obtained absolution, or else it was oblivion, below.
Soon after the plunge her first object of meditation was Colonel De