But she returned to the fragile eighteenth century statuettes. He let her have her way, tolerant, determined not to force her interest. He watched her. There was about the little terra cotta groups a false paganism, a windy grace, that intrigued and allured her. Here was something that she could nearly understand; nearly, if not quite; not quite, for there was still something, or the lack of something, which troubled her; she could not put a name to it, consider how she might, with a pucker between her brows. These dimpled children, with the thighs and hoofs of goats,--these girls with draperies blown by the wind at the moment when the sculptor caught and fixed them motionless for ever,--these young men with slanting eyes and laughing mouths,--of what did they remind her? and in what were they so evasively deficient? She circled round the table on which they stood. Calladine’s eyes followed her in amusement. She was puzzled, this nymph who was so much more like a nymph than any nymph that Clodion ever made, puzzled by the drawing-room _faroucherie_ of these false fugitives. “A little self-conscious, you find them?” he had murmured at last. But the artistic education of Clare proved a game that had palled. She had gone clean through his objects of virtue, and had come out the other side. She seemed to have been briefly deluded by them, then to have sized them up, to have detected their essential fraud, and to have discarded them from her interest. Mortified though he was, he perceived somewhere in himself a respect for her pure, uneducated instinct. Still, as this was a thing he could not, out of self-respect, admit, he continued at intervals his efforts to guide her feet into the paths he himself found so pleasant. He liked to sit within doors re-ordering his books and his treasures, while the snow drifted up against the windows and the wind cried unappeasably across the Downs. “Why are you staring out at that ugly landscape, Clare? Don’t you like the fire better, and a chair, and a book to read?” But she read very seldom; only once, when she had been reading, he saw to his consternation that tears were falling silently down her cheeks, and, going up behind her, he had seen over her shoulder that Shelley lay open on her knee: If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear, If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee, A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share The impulse of thy strength, only less free Than thou, O uncontrollable!... “Clare, why so silent? I declare, you’ve grown more meditative than I,--where’s your irresponsibility? is the dignity of marriage so heavy upon you? Were you as silent with your friend Lovel? didn’t you prattle to _him_? eh, tell me?” “What funny questions you ask, Richard. Lovel? I don’t remember. No, I don’t think I ever talked much to Lovel.” “Well, but in all those hours you spent, riding with him, fishing, and I don’t know what else....”