“So you are keeping up a violent correspondence with that man,” she remarked acidly to Clytie. It is the way of some women to exaggerate. Clytie bit her lip, cheeking an impulsive answer. What was the use of a retort? Women of broad, liberal education, with interests beyond the nursery, still-room, and the afternoon-tea table, are known to live together, like men, in comparative harmony. They have learned the lesson the higher, broader life teaches of rising or declining instinctively to another being's plane of thought or feeling. It is hardly a fault of sex that women are petty, spiteful, and intolerant. When the conditions of life are narrow and illiberal any human being, man or woman, runs the risk of being shaped by them. And that is why Mrs. Blather and Janet, good, upright women according to their lights, subordinated their affection to their principles, and stood away shocked from their sister. Their traditional ideals of femininity had been sinned against. The crime was all but unpardonable. It was always present with them, always assuming fresh, distorted shapes. They were on a different plane from Clytie, and viewed all her actions in a false perspective. Clytie was hurt, wounded in her womanly pride. She knew that there was much clay in her composition, and often felt with chastening self-abasement how much nearer the angels Winifred was than herself. Yet she was accustomed to live in an atmosphere free from reproach. Winifred, Kent, the Farquharsons, and others of her friends might touch with light, tender finger on here and there an imperfection in her character or conduct; for this she was grateful, knowing the deeper feelings of esteem and respect that prompted. But to move in a circle where she was looked upon as a black sheep, as a girl on the path to unutterable abysses, galled her to the quick, sent the hot blood mounting in stinging waves to her cheek, leaving the heart cold. Yet she had learned not to blame her sisters over much. She had lost her militant scorn of Jacob. Kent had taught her that although Esau might possess the higher birthright which no bartering of pottage could alienate, there was still saving grace in the stolen birthright which Jacob guarded so jealously. But this knowledge did not make her heart less sore.