gallant side as well as a bad; an excellent case for rhetoric.  Marko supplied the world’s opinion of the affair, bravely owning it to be not unfavourable.  Her worthy relatives, the Frau v.  Crestow and husband, had very properly furnished a report to the family of the memorable evening; and the hubbub over it, with the epithets applied to Alvan, intimated how he would have been received on a visit to demand her in marriage.  There was no chance of her being allowed to enter houses where this ‘rageing demagogue and popular buffoon’ was a guest; his name was banished from her hearing, so she was compelled to have recourse to Marko.  Unable to take such services without rewarding him, she fondled:  it pained her to see him suffer.  Those who toss crumbs to their domestic favourites will now and then be moved to toss meat, which is not so good for them, but the dumb mendicant’s delight in it is winning, and a little cannot hurt.  Besides, if any one had a claim on her it was the prince; and as he was always adoring, never importunate, he restored her to the pedestal she had been really rudely shaken from by that other who had caught her up suddenly into the air, and dropped her!  A hand abandoned to her slave rewarded him immeasurably.  A heightening of the reward almost took his life.  In the peacefulness of dealing with a submissive love that made her queenly, the royal, which plucked her from throne to footstool, seemed predatory and insolent.  Thus, after that scene of ‘first love,’ in which she had been actress, she became almost (with an inward thrill or two for the recovering of him) reconciled to the not seeing of the noble actor; for nothing could erase the scene—­it was historic; and Alvan would always be thought of as a delicious electricity.  She and Marko were together on the summer excursion of her people, and quite sisterly, she could say, in her delicate scorn of his advantages and her emotions.  True gentlemen are imperfectly valued when they are under the shadow of giants; but still Clotilde’s experience of a giant’s manners was favourable to the liberty she could enjoy in a sisterly intimacy of this kind, rather warmer than her word for it would imply.  She owned that she could better live the poetic life—­that is, trifle with fire and reflect on its charms in the society of Marko.  He was very young, he was little more than an adolescent, and safely timid; a turn of her fingers would string or slacken him.  One could play on him securely, thinking of a distant day —­and some shipwreck of herself for an interlude—­when he might be made happy.

Her strangest mood of the tender cruelty was when the passion to anatomize him beset her.  The ground of it was, that she found him in her likeness, adoring as she adored, and a similar loftiness; now grovelling, now soaring; the most radiant of beings, the most abject; and the pleasure she had of the sensational comparison was in an alteregoistic home she found in him, that allowed of her gathering a picked self-knowledge,