deceived her just
expectations, and was a vain pretender to the superhuman:--for it was
only a superhuman Jew and democrat whom she could have thought of
espousing. The pusillanimous are under a necessity to be self-consoled
when they are not self-justified: it is their instinctive manner of
putting themselves in the right to themselves. The love she bore him,
because it was the love his high conceit exacted, hung on success she was
ready to fly with him and love him faithfully but not without some reason
(where reason, we will own, should not quite so coldly obtrude) will it
seem to her, that the man who would not fly, and would try the conflict,
insisted to stake her love on the issue he provoked. He roused the
tempest, he angered the Fates, he tossed her to them; and reason, coldest
reason, close as it ever is to the craven's heart in its hour of trial,
whispers that he was prompted to fling the gambler's die by the swollen
conceit in his fortune rather than by his desire for the prize. That
frigid reason of the craven has red-hot perceptions. It spies the spot of
truth. Were the spot revealed in the man the whole man, then, so unerring
is the eyeshot at him, we should have only to transform ourselves into
cowards fronting a crisis to read him through and topple over the Sphinx
of life by presenting her the sum of her most mysterious creature in an
epigram. But there was as much more in Alvan than any faint-hearted
thing, seeing however keenly, could see, as there is more in the world
than the epigrams aimed at it contain.

'Courage!' said he: and she tremblingly: 'Be careful!' And then they were
in the presence of her mother and sister.

Her sister was at the window, hanging her head low, a poor figure. Her
mother stood in the middle of the room, and met them full face, with a
woman's combative frown of great eyes, in which the stare is a bolt.

'Away with that man! I will not suffer him near me,' she cried.

Alvan advanced to her: 'Tell me, madame, in God's name, what you have
against me.'

She swung her back on him. 'Go, sir! my husband will know how to deal
with one like you. Out of my sight, I say!'

The brutality of this reception of Alvan nerved Clotilde. She went up to
him, and laying her hand on his arm, feeling herself almost his equal,
said: 'Let us go: come. I will not bear to hear you so spoken to. No one
shall treat you like that when I am near.'

She expected him to give up the hopeless task, af