ou spoke.'

'I must be a shameless plagiarist,' said Clotilde.

'Or he,' said Count Kollin.

It is here the place of the Chorus to state that these: ideas were in the
air at the time; sparks of the Vulcanic smithy at work in politics and
pervading literature: which both Alvan and Clotilde might catch and give
out as their own, in the honest belief that the epigram was, original to
them. They were not members of a country where literature is confined to
its little paddock, without, influence on the larger field (part lawn,
part marsh) of the social world: they were readers in sympathetic action
with thinkers and literary artists. Their saying in common, 'Plutarch's
Pompeius,' may be traceable to a reading of some professorial article on
the common portrait-painting of the sage of Chaeroneia. The dainty
savageness in the 'bite' Plutarch mentions, evidently struck on a
similarity of tastes in both, as it has done with others. And in regard
to Caesar, Clotilde thought much of Caesar; she had often wished that
Caesar (for the additional pleasure in thinking of him) had been endowed
with the beauty of his rival: one or two of Plutarch's touches upon the
earlier history of Pompeius had netted her fancy, faintly (your
generosity must be equal to hearing it) stung her blood; she liked the
man; and if he had not been beaten in the end, she would have preferred
him femininely. His name was not written Pompey to her, as in English, to
sound absurd: it was a note of grandeur befitting great and lamentable
fortunes, which the young lady declined to share solely because of her
attraction to the victor, her compulsion to render unto the victor the
sunflower's homage. She rendered it as a slave: the splendid man beloved
to ecstasy by the flower of Roman women was her natural choice.

Alvan could not be even a Caesar in person, he was a Jew. Still a Jew of
whom Count Kollin spoke so warmly must be exceptional, and of the
exceptional she dreamed. He might have the head of a Caesar. She imagined
a huge head, the cauldron of a boiling brain, anything but bright to the
eye, like a pot always on the fire, black, greasy, encrusted, unkempt:
the head of a malicious tremendous dwarf. Her hungry inquiries in a city
where Alvan was well known, brought her full information of one who
enjoyed a highly convivial reputation besides the influence of his
political leadership; but no description of his aspect accompanied it,
for where he was nightly t