y by
little, by a day-eighteen hours. How lurid a satire was flung on events
by the proximity of the dates! But the closeness of the time between this
love-crooning and the denying of him pointed to a tyrannous intervention.
One could detect it. Full surely the poor craven was being tyrannized and
tutored to deny him! though she was a puss of the fields too, as the
mounted sportsman was not unwilling to think.

Before visiting his Mentor, Alvan applied for an audience of General von
Rudiger, who granted it at once to a man coming so well armed to claim
the privilege. Tresten walked part of the way to the General's house with
him, and then turned aside to visit the baroness.

Lucie, Baroness von Crefeldt, was one of those persons who, after a
probationary term in the character of woman, have become men, but of whom
offended man, amazed by the flowering up of that hard rough jaw from the
tender blooming promise of a petticoat, finds it impossible to imagine
they had once on a sweet Spring time the sex's gentleness and charm of
aspect. Mistress Flanders, breeched and hatted like a man, pulling at the
man's short pipe and heartily invoking frouzy deities, committing a whole
sackful of unfeminine etcaetera, is an impenetrable wall to her maiden
past; yet was there an opening day when nothing of us moustached her. She
was a clear-faced girl and mother of young blushes before the years were
at their work of transformation upon her countenance and behind her
bosom. The years were rough artists: perhaps she was combative, and
fought them for touching her ungallantly; and that perhaps was her first
manly step. Baroness Lucie was of high birth, a wife openly maltreated, a
woman of breeding, but with a man's head, capable of inspiring man-like
friendships, and of entertaining them. She was radically-minded, strongly
of the Radical profession of faith, and a correspondent of revolutionary
chiefs; both the trusted adviser and devoted slave of him whose future
glorious career she measured by his abilities. Rumour blew out a candle
and left the wick to smoke in relation to their former intercourse. The
Philistines revenged themselves on an old aristocratic Radical and a Jew
demagogue with the weapon that scandal hands to virtue. They are virtuous
or nothing, and they must show that they are so when they can; and best
do they show it by publicly dishonouring the friendship of a man and a
woman; for to be in error in malice does not hurt