After the little coolness of the past few days (her aunt's fault entirely, Alwynne knew, and so could be unruffled) Elsbeth's renewal of sympathetic interest was very soothing. Alwynne was glad to foster it by talking of Clare, and Clare, and nothing but Clare, for the rest of the week. In church on Christmas morning, poor Elsbeth, settling her spiritual accounts, begging forgiveness for uncharitable thoughts, and assuring her Maker that she wished Clare no evil, could yet sigh for the useful age of miracles, and patron saints, and devils, when a prayer in the right quarter could transport your enemy to inaccessible islands of the Antipodes. She would have been magnanimous, have bargained for every comfort--Eden's climate and hot and cold water laid on--but the island must be definitely inaccessible and Antipodean. Clare, too, had spent her morning, if not in prayer, at least in profound meditation. She felt stranded, and was wishing for Alwynne, and anathematising the superfluous and intriguing aunt. Clare made the mistake of all tortuous intelligences in being unable to credit appearances. She was being, as usual, unjust to Elsbeth, Alwynne, and the world at large. She could not believe in simplicity combined with brains: a simple soul was necessarily a simpleton in her eyes. Because her own words were ever two edged, her meaning flavoured by reservations and implications, she literally could not accept a speech as expressing no more and no less than its plain dictionary meaning. With any one of her own type of mind she was at her ease; her mistake lay in not recognising how rare that type was; in detecting subtleties where none existed, and wasting hint, suggestion and innuendo on minds that drove as heartily through them as an ox walks through a spider thread stretched from post to gatepost of the meadow he means to enter. Elsbeth, whom she had considered a negligible fool, had yesterday startled her into respect--not for the kindly and selfless pleasure in Alwynne's pleasure, that had, for all her little jealous anxieties, prompted the invitation to Clare, but for the totally imaginary cunning with which, in Clare's eyes, it had invested her. Alwynne's repetition of Elsbeth's remark had enlightened Clare: enlightened her to qualities in Elsbeth which Elsbeth herself would have been horrified to possess. Clare saw, in the manner of the invitation, a gauntlet flung down, the preliminaries to a conflict, with Alwynne herself for the prize; and the first warning of an antagonist sufficiently like herself to be considered dangerous, the more dangerous, indeed, for the apparently uninteresting harmlessness that could mask a mind in reality so scheming and so complex. She did not realise that if she did finally close with Elsbeth, with the intention of robbing her of Alwynne, she would have far more to fear from her simple, affectionate goodness of heart than from any subtlety of intellect with which Clare was choosing to invest her.