misreading of a lovers' quarrel, so that everything looked full of
promise as far as Willoughby's exercise of policy went.

But the strange pang traversing him now convicted him of a large
adulteration of profitless temper with it. The loyalty of De Craye to a
friend, where a woman walked in the drama, was notorious. It was there,
and a most flexible thing it was: and it soon resembled reason
manipulated by the sophists. Not to have reckoned on his peculiar
loyalty was proof of the blindness cast on us by temper.

And De Craye had an Irish tongue; and he had it under control, so that
he could talk good sense and airy nonsense at discretion. The strongest
overboiling of English Puritan contempt of a gabbler, would not stop
women from liking it. Evidently Clara did like it, and Willoughby
thundered on her sex. Unto such brainless things as these do we, under
the irony of circumstances, confide our honour!

For he was no gabbler. He remembered having rattled in earlier days; he
had rattled with an object to gain, desiring to be taken for an easy,
careless, vivacious, charming fellow, as any young gentleman may be who
gaily wears the golden dish of Fifty thousand pounds per annum, nailed
to the back of his very saintly young pate. The growth of the critical
spirit in him, however, had informed him that slang had been a
principal component of his rattling; and as he justly supposed it a
betraying art for his race and for him, he passed through the prim and
the yawning phases of affected indifference, to the pine Puritanism of
a leaden contempt of gabblers.

They snare women, you see--girls! How despicable the host of girls!--at
least, that girl below there!