he became almost (with an inward thrill or two for the
recovering of him) reconciled to the not seeing of the noble actor; for
nothing could erase the scene--it was historic; and Alvan would always be
thought of as a delicious electricity. She and Marko were together on the
summer excursion of her people, and quite sisterly, she could say, in her
delicate scorn of his advantages and her emotions. True gentlemen are
imperfectly valued when they are under the shadow of giants; but still
Clotilde's experience of a giant's manners was favourable to the liberty
she could enjoy in a sisterly intimacy of this kind, rather warmer than
her word for it would imply. She owned that she could better live the
poetic life--that is, trifle with fire and reflect on its charms in the
society of Marko. He was very young, he was little more than an
adolescent, and safely timid; a turn of her fingers would string or
slacken him. One could play on him securely, thinking of a distant
day--and some shipwreck of herself for an interlude--when he might be
made happy.

Her strangest mood of the tender cruelty was when the passion to
anatomize him beset her. The ground of it was, that she found him in her
likeness, adoring as she adored, and a similar loftiness; now grovelling,
now soaring; the most radiant of beings, the most abject; and the
pleasure she had of the sensational comparison was in an alteregoistic
home she found in him, that allowed of her gathering a picked
self-knowledge, and of her saying: 'That is like me: that is very like
me: that is terribly like': up to the point where the comparison wooed
her no longer with an agreeable lure of affinity, but nipped her so
shrewdly as to force her to say: 'That is he, not I': and the vivisected
youth received the caress which quickened him to wholeness at a touch. It
was given with impulsive tenderness, in pity of him. Anatomy is the title
for the operation, because the probing of herself in another, with the
liberty to cease probing as soon as it hurt her, allowed her while unhurt
to feel that she prosecuted her researches in a dead body. The moment her
strong susceptibility to the likeness shrank under a stroke of pain, she
abstained from carving, and simultaneously conscious that he lived, she
was kind to him.

'This love of yours, Marko--is it so deep?'

'I love you.'

'You think me the highest and best?'

'You are.'

'So deep that you could bear anything from me?'

'Try me!'