Clare carried out her intentions, unmoved by all the entreaties addressed to her. She heard everything that was said with perfect calm; either her capabilities of emotion were altogether exhausted, or her passionate sense of wrong was too deep to show at the surface, and she was calm as a marble statue; but she was equally inflexible. Edgar turned, in spite of himself, into Arthur Arden’s advocate; pleaded with her, setting forth every reason he could think of, partly against his own judgment--and failed. Her husband, against whom she did not absolutely close her door, threw himself at her feet, and entreated, for the children’s sake, for the sake of all that was most important to them both--the credit of their house, the good name of their boy. These were arguments which with Clare, in her natural mind, would have been unanswerable; but that had happened to Clare which warps the mind from its natural modes of thought. The idea of disgrace had got into her very soul, like a canker. She was unable to examine her reasons--unable to resist, even in herself, this overwhelming influence; it overcame her principles, and even her prejudices, which are more difficult to overcome. The fear of scandal, which those who knew Clare would have supposed sufficient to make her endure anything, failed totally here. She knew that her behaviour would make the world talk, and she even felt that, with this clue to some profound disagreement between her husband and herself, the whole story might be more easily revealed, and her boy’s heirship made impossible; but even with this argument she could not subdue herself, nor suffer herself to be subdued. The sense of outrage had taken possession of her; she could not forget it--could not realize the possibility of ever forgetting it. It was not that she had been brought within the reach of possible disgrace. She _was_ disgraced; the very formality of the new marriage, though she consented to it without question, as a necessity, was a new outrage. In short, Clare, though she acted with a determination and steadiness which seemed to add force to her character, and showed her natural powers as nothing else had ever done, was not, for the first time in her life, a free agent. She had been taken possession of by a passionate sense of injury, which seized upon her as an evil spirit might seize upon its victim. In the very fierceness of her individual resentment, she ceased to be an individual, and became an abstraction, a woman wronged, capable of feeling, knowing, thinking of nothing but her wrong. This made all arguments powerless, all pleas foolish. She could not admit any alternative into her mind; her powers of reasoning failed her altogether on this subject; on all others she was sane and sensible, but on this had all the onesidedness, the narrowness of madness--or of the twin-sister of madness--irrepressible and irrepressed passion.