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She therefore could not withstand his argument. But with the self-combating proclivity of the supersensitive, an answer thereto arose in Clare’s own mind, and he almost feared it. It was based on her exceptional physical nature; and she might have used it promisingly. She might have added besides: ‘On an Australian upland or Texan plain, who is to know or care about my misfortunes, or to reproach me or you?’ Yet, like the majority of women, she accepted the momentary presentment as if it were the inevitable. And she may have been right. The heart of woman knoweth not only its own bitterness, but it’s husband’s, and even if these assumed reproaches were not likely to be addressed to him or to his by strangers, they might have reached his ears from his own fastidious brain.

It was the third day of the estrangement. Clare’s love was ethereal to a fault, imaginative to impracticability. With these natures, corporeal presence is sometimes less appealing than corporeal absence; the latter creating an ideal presence that conveniently drops the defects of the real. She found that her personality did not plead her cause so forcibly as she had anticipated.