"You admire Clarissa for her piety, perhaps?" he said. "That is what our fine ladies pretend to appreciate, though they are most of them heathens."
"I admire her for her self-respect," answered Tonia. "That is her highest quality. When was there ever a temper so meek, joined with such fortitude, such heroic resolve?"
"She was a proud, self-willed minx," said Kilrush, entranced with the vivid expression of her face, with the fire in her speech.
"'Twas a woman's pride in her womanhood, a woman fighting against her arch enemy----"
"The man she loved. 'Twas that made the struggle desperate. She knew she loved him."
"If she had been kinder, now, and had let love conquer?" insinuated Kilrush.
"She would not have been Clarissa; she would not have been the long-suffering angel, the martyr in virtue's cause."
"Prythee, my lord, do not laugh at my daughter's high-flown sentiments," said Thornton. "I have done my best to educate her reason; but while there are romancers like Samuel Richardson to instil folly 'tis difficult to rear a sensible woman."
"That warmth of sentiment is more delightful than all your cold reason, Thornton; but I compliment you on the education which has made this young lady to tower above her sex."
"Oh, my lord, do not laugh at me. I have just learnt enough to know that I am ignorant," said Tonia, with her grand air--grand because so careless, as of one who is alike indifferent to the effect of her words and the opinion of those with whom she converses.
Kilrush prolonged his visit into a second hour, during which the conversation flitted from books to people, from romance to politics, and never hung fire. He took leave reluctantly, apologizing for having stayed so long, and gave no hint of repeating his visit, nor was asked to do so. But he meant to come again and again, having as he thought established himself upon a footing of intimacy. A Grub-Street hack could have no strait-laced ideas--a man who had been in jail for something very like larceny, and who had educated his young daughter as a free-thinker.
"She finds my conversation an agreeable relief after a ten years' _tête-à-tête_ with Thornton," he told himself, as he picked his way through the filth of Green Street to Leicester Fields. "But 'tis easy to see she thinks I have passed the age of loving, and is as much at home with me as if I were her grandfather. Yet 'twas a beautiful red that flushed her cheek when I entered the room. Well, if she is pleased to converse with me 'tis something; and I must school myself to taste a platonic attachment. A Lovelace of seven and forty! How she would jeer at the notion!"