elation the moment was to bring. So little a thing! His intellect
weighed the littleness of it, but he had become level with it; he
magnified it with the greatness of his desire, and such was his nature
that the great desire of a thing withheld from him and his own, as he
could think, made the world a whirlpool till he had it. He waited,
figureable by nothing so much as a wild horse in captivity sniffing the
breeze, when the flanks of the quivering beast are like a wind-struck
barley-field, and his nerves are cords, and his nostrils trumpet him: he
is flame kept under and straining to rise.

CHAPTER XVII

The baroness expected to see Alvan in the morning, for he kept
appointments, and he had said he would come. She conceived that she was
independent of personal wishes on the subject of Clotilde; the fury of
his passion prohibited her forming any of the wishes we send up to
destiny when matters interesting us are in suspense, whether we have
liberated minds or not. She thought the girl would grant the interview;
was sure the creature would yield in his presence; and then there was an
end to the shining of Alvan! Supposing the other possibility, he had
shown her such fierce illuminations of eye and speech that she foresaw it
would be a blazing of the insurrectionary beacon-fires of hell with him.
He was a man of angels and devils. The former had long been conquering,
but the latter were far from extinct. His passion for this shallow girl
had consigned him to the lower host. Let him be thwarted, his desperation
would be unlikely to stop at legal barriers. His lawyer's head would be
up and armed astoundingly to oppose the law; he would read, argue, and
act with hot conviction upon the reverse of every text of law. She beheld
him storming the father's house to have out Clotilde, reluctant or
conniving; and he harangued the people, he bore off his captive, he held
her firmly as he had sworn he would; he defied authority, he was a public
rebel--he with his detected little secret aim, which he nursed like a
shamed mother of an infant, fond but afraid to be proud of it! She had
seen that he aimed at standing well with the world and being one with it
honourably: holding to his principles of course: but a disposition that
way had been perceived, and the vision of him in open rebellion because
of his shy catching at the thread of an alliance with the decorous world,
carved an ironic line on her jaw.

Full surely he would no