k is too much for her. So, then, we are in your hands,
child! Adieu, and let the gold-crested serpent glide to her bed, and
sleep, dream, and wake, and ask herself in the morning whether she is not
a wedded soul. Is she not a serpent? gold-crested, all the world may see;
and with a mortal bite, I know. I have had the bite before the kisses.
That is rather an unjust reversal of the order of things. Apropos, Hamlet
was poisoned--ghost-poisoned.'

'Mad, he was mad!' said Clotilde, recovering and smiling.

'He was born bilious; he partook of the father's constitution, not the
mother's. High-thoughted, quick-nerved to follow the thought, reflective,
if an interval yawned between his hand and the act, he was by nature
two-minded: as full of conscience as a nursing mother that sleeps beside
her infant:--she hears the silent beginning of a cry. Before the ghost
walked he was an elementary hero; one puff of action would have whiffed
away his melancholy. After it, he was a dizzy moralizer, waiting for the
winds to blow him to his deed-ox out. The apparition of his father to him
poisoned a sluggish run of blood, and that venom in the blood distracted
a head steeped in Wittenberg philosophy. With metaphysics in one and
poison in the other, with the outer world opened on him and this world
stirred to confusion, he wore the semblance of madness; he was throughout
sane; sick, but never with his reason dethroned.'

'Nothing but madness excuses his conduct to Ophelia!'

'Poison in the blood is a pretty good apology for infidelity to a lady.'

'No!'

'Well, to an Ophelia of fifty?' said Alvan.

Clotilde laughed, not perfectly assured of the wherefore, but pleased to
be able to laugh. Her friends were standing at the house door, farewells
were spoken, Alvan had gone. And then she thought of the person that
Ophelia of fifty might be, who would have to find a good apology for him
in his dose of snake-bite, or love of a younger woman whom he termed
gold-crested serpent.

He was a lover, surely a lover: he slid off to some chance bit of
likeness to himself in every subject he discussed with her.

And she? She speeded recklessly on the back of the centaur when he had
returned to the state of phantom and the realities he threatened her with
were no longer imminent.

CHAPTER V

Clotilde was of the order of the erring who should by rights have a short
sermon to preface an exposure of them, administering the whip to her own
sex