lord, and this, owing to an appearance of satisfactory deception that it bore, led to her thinking guiltily.  We may ask it:  an eagle is expected, and how is he to declare his eagleship save by breaking through our mean conventional systems, tearing links asunder, taking his own in the teeth of vulgar ordinances?  Clotilde’s imagination drew on her reading for the knots it tied and untied, and its ideas of grandeur.  Her reading was an interfusion of philosophy skimmed, and realistic romances deep-sounded.  She tried hard, but could get no other terrible tangle for her hero’s exhibition of flaming azure divineness than the vile one of the wedded woman.  Further thinking of it, she revived and recovered; she despised the complication, yet without perceiving how else he was to manifest himself legitimately in a dull modern world.  The rescuing her from death would be a poor imitation of worn-out heroes.  His publication of a trumpeting book fell appallingly flat in her survey.  Deeds of gallantry done as an officer in war (defending his country too) distinguished the soldier, but failed to add the eagle feather to the man.  She had a mind of considerable soaring scope, and eclectic:  it analyzed a Napoleon, and declined the position of his empress.  The man must be a gentleman.  Poets, princes, warriors, potentates, marched before her speculative fancy unselected.

So far, as far as she can be portrayed introductorily, she is not without exemplars in the sex.  Young women have been known to turn from us altogether, never to turn back, so poor and shrunken, or so fleshly-bulgy have we all appeared in the fairy jacket they wove for the right one of us to wear becomingly.  But the busy great world was round Clotilde while she was malleable, though she might be losing her fresh ideas of the hammer and the block, and that is a world of much solicitation to induce a vivid girl to merge an ideal in a living image.  Supposing, when she has accomplished it, that men justify her choice, the living will retain the colours of the ideal.  We have it on record that he may seem an eagle.

‘You talk curiously like Alvan, do you know,’ a gentleman of her country said to her as they were descending the rock of Capri, one day.  He said it musingly.

He belonged to a circle beneath her own:  the learned and artistic.  She had not heard of this Alvan, or had forgotten him; but professing universal knowledge, especially of celebrities, besides having an envious eye for that particular circle, which can pretend to be the choicest of all, she was unwilling to betray her ignorance, and she dimpled her cheek, as one who had often heard the thing said to her before.  She smiled musingly.

CHAPTER II

‘Who is the man they call Alvan?’ She put the question at the first opportunity to an aunt of hers.

Up went five-fingered hands.  This violent natural sign of horror was comforting:  she saw that he was a celebrity indeed.