lotilde entered into the extravagance with a happy simulation of zest.

'Simply, we will say. My time had come, and I took no sturdy pose, but
let the life-stream run its course for a less confined embankment.
Sapphire sea, sapphire sky: one believes in life there, thrills with it,
when life is ebbing: ay, as warmly as when life is at the flow in our
sick and shrivelled North--the climate for dried fish! Verily the second
death of hearing that a gold-haired Lucretia had been on the island seven
days earlier, was harder to bear. Tell me frankly--the music in Italy?'

'Amorous and martial, brainless and monotonous.'

'Excellent!' his eyes flashed delightedly. 'O comrade of comrades! that
year lost to me will count heavily as I learn to value those I have
gained. Yes, brainless! There, in music, we beat them, as politically
France beats us. No life without brain! The brainless in Art and in
Statecraft are nothing but a little more obstructive than the dead. It is
less easy to cut a way through them. But it must be done, or the
Philistine will be as the locust in his increase, and devour the green
blades of the earth. You have been trained to shudder at the demagogue?'

'I do not shudder,' said Clotilde.

'A diamond from the lapidary!--Your sentences have many facets. Well, you
are conversing with a demagogue, an avowed one: a demagogue and a Jew.
You take it as a matter of course: you should exhibit some sparkling
incredulity. The Christian is like the politician in supposing the
original obverse of him everlastingly the same, after the pattern of the
monster he was originally taught to hate. But the Jew has been a little
christianized, and we have a little bejewed the Christian. So with
demagogues: as we see the conservative crumbling, we grow conservatived.
Try to think individually upon what you have to learn collectively--that
is your task. You are of the few who will be equal to it. We are not men
of blood, believe me. I am not. For example, I detest and I decline the
duel. I have done it, and proved myself a man of metal notwithstanding.
To say nothing of the inhumanity, the senselessness of duelling revolts
me. 'Tis a folly, so your nobles practise it, and your royal wiseacre
sanctions. No blood for me: and yet I tell you that whatever opposes me,
I will sweep away. How? With the brain. If we descend to poor brute
strength or brutal craft, it is from failing in the brain: we quit the
leadership of our forces, and