al breathing Spring, softer, warmer
than the ancient one, gold instead of snowcrested, and fully as intrepid
as devoted, was an immense joy to Alvan. He took it luxuriously because
he believed in his fortune, a kind of natal star, the common heritage of
the adventurous, that brought him his good things in time, in return for
energetic strivings in a higher direction apart from his natural
longings.

Fortune had delayed, he had wintered long. All the sweeter was the breath
of the young Spring. That exquisite new sweetness robed Clotilde in the
attributes of the person dreamed of for his mate; and deductively
assuming her to possess them, he could not doubt his power of winning
her. Barriers are for those who cannot fly. The barriers were palpable
about a girl of noble Christian birth: so was the courage in her which
would give her wings, he thought, coming to that judgement through the
mixture of his knowledge of himself and his perusal of her exterior. He
saw that she could take an impression deeply enough to express it
sincerely, and he counted on it, sympathetically endowing her with his
courage to support the originality she was famed for.

They were interrupted between-whiles by weariful men running to Alvan for
counsel on various matters--how to play their game, or the exact phrasing
of some pregnant sentence current in politics or literature. He satisfied
them severally and shouldered them away, begging for peace that night.
Clotilde corroborated his accurate recital of the lines of a contested
verse of the incomparable Heinrich, and they fell to capping verses of
the poet-lucid metheglin, with here and there no dubious flavour of acid,
and a lively sting in the tail of the honey. Sentiment, cynicism, and
satin impropriety and scabrous, are among those verses, where pure poetry
has a recognized voice; but the lower elements constitute the popularity
in a cultivated society inclining to wantonness out of bravado as well as
by taste. Alvan, looking indolently royal and royally roguish, quoted a
verse that speaks of the superfluousness of a faithless lady's vowing
bite:

'The kisses were in the course of things,
The bite was a needless addition.'

Clotilde could not repress her reddening--Count Kollin had repeated too
much! She dropped her eyes, with a face of sculpture, then resumed their
chatter. He spared her the allusion to Pompeius. She convinced him of her
capacity for reserve besides intrepi