right am I too, between that metal-rail
of a politician and the deep dreamer, each of them incomplete for want of
an element of the other!' Practically and in vision right was Alvan, for
those two opposites met fusing in him: like the former, he counted on the
supremacy of might; like the latter, he distinguished where it lay in
perpetuity.

During his younger years he had been like neither in the moral curb they
could put on themselves--particularly the southern-blooded man. He had
resembled the naturally impatient northerner most, though not so supple
for business as he. But now he possessed the calmness of the Genoese; he
had strong self-command now; he had the principle that life is too short
for the indulgence of public fretfulness or of private quarrels; too
valuable for fruitless risks; too sacred, one may say, for the shedding
of blood on personal grounds. Oh! he had himself well under, fear not.

He could give and take from opposition. And rightly so, seeing that he
confessed to his own bent for sarcastically stinging: he was therefore
bound to endure a retort. Speech for speech, pamphlet for pamphlet, he
could be temperate. Nay, he defied an adversary to produce in him the
sensation of intemperateness; so there would not be much danger of his
being excited to betray it. Shadowily he thought of the hard words hurled
at him by the Rudigers, and of the injury Clotilde's father did him by
plotting to rob him of his daughter. But how had an Alvan replied?--with
the arts of peaceful fence victoriously. He conceived of no temptation to
his repressed irascibility save the political. A day might come for him
and the vehement old Ironer to try their mettle in a tussle. On that day
he would have to be wary, but, as Alvan felt assured, he would be more
master of himself than his antagonist. He was for the young world, in the
brain of a new order of things; the other based his unbending system on
the visions of a feudal chief, and would win a great step perchance, but
there he would stop: he was not with the future!

This immediate prospect of a return to serenity after his recent
charioteering, had set him thinking of himself and his days to come,
which hung before him in a golden haze that was tranquillizing. He had a
name, he had a station: he wanted power and he saw it approaching.

He wanted a wife too. Colonel von Tresten took coffee with him previous
to the start with Dr. Storchel to General von Rudiger's house.