’Your task of two hours, then, will be accomplished, I compute, in about half a minute—­but it is on the assumption that she consents to see you alone,’ said the baroness.

Alvan opened his eyes.  He perceived in his deep sagaciousness woman at the bottom of her remark, and replied:  ’You will know Clotilde in time.  She points to me straight; but of course if you agitate the compass the needle’s all in a tremble:  and the vessel is weak, I admit, but the instinct’s positive.  To doubt it would upset my understanding.  I have had three distinct experiences of my influence over her, and each time, curiously each time exactly in proportion to my degree of resolve—­but, baroness, I tell you it was minutely in proportion to it; weighed down to the grain!—­each time did that girl respond to me with a similar degree of earnestness.  As I waned, she waned; as I heated, so did she, and from spark-heat to flame and to furnace-heat!’

‘A refraction of the rays according to the altitude of the orb,’ observed the baroness in a tone of assent, and she smiled to herself at the condition of the man who could accept it for that.

He did not protest beyond presently a transient frown as at a bad taste on his tongue, and a rather petulant objection to her use of analogies, which he called the sapping of language.  She forbore to remind him in retort of his employment of metaphor when the figure served his purpose.

‘Marvellously,’ cried Alvan, ’marvellously that girl answered to my lead! and to-morrow—­you’ll own me right—­I must double the attraction.  I shall have to hand her back to her people for twenty-four hours, and the dose must be doubled to keep her fast and safe.  You see I read her flatly.  I read and am charitable.  I have a perfect philosophical tolerance.  I’m in the mood to-day of Horace hymning one of his fair Greeks.’

‘No, no that is a comparison past my endurance,’ interposed the baroness.  ’Friend Sigismund, you have no philosophy, you never had any; and the small crow and croon of Horace would be the last you could take up.  It is the chanted philosophy of comfortable stipendiaries, retired merchants, gouty patients on a restricted allowance of the grape, old men who have given over thinking, and young men who never had feeling—­the philosophy of swine grunting their carmen as they turn to fat in the sun.  Horace avaunt!  You have too much poetry in you to quote that unsanguine sensualist for your case.  His love distressed his liver, and gave him a jaundice once or twice, but where his love yields its poor ghost to his philosophy, yours begins its labours.  That everlasting Horace!  He is the versifier of the cushioned enemy, not of us who march along flinty ways:  the piper of the bourgeois in soul, poet of the conforming unbelievers!’