ht be, in her dainty fashion, yet honestly and without mincing, his
possible boonfellow: he and she, glass in hand, thanking the bountiful
heavens, blessing mankind in chorus. It belonged to his hearty dream
of the wife he would choose, were she to be had. The position of
interpreter of heaven's benevolence to mankind through his own enjoyment
of the gifts, was one that he sagaciously demanded for himself, sharing
it with the Philistine unknowingly; and to have a wife no less wise than
he on this throne of existence was a rosy exaltation. Clotilde kindled
to the hint of his festival mood of Solomon at the banquet. She was not
devoid of a discernment of flavours; she had heard grave judges at her
father's board profoundly deliver their verdicts upon this and that
vineyard and vintage; and it is a note of patriotism in her country to
be enthusiastic for wine of the Rhine: she was, moreover, thirsty from
much talking and excitement. She drank her glass relishingly, declaring
the wine princely. Alvan smacked his hands in a rapture: 'You are not
for the extract of raisin our people have taken to copy from French
Sauternes, to suit a female predilection for sugar?'

'No, no, the grape for me!' said she: 'the Rhine grape with the elf in
it, and the silver harp and the stained legend!'

'Glorious!'

He toasted the grape. 'Wine of the grape is the young bride--the young
sun-bride! divine, and never too sweet, never cloying like the withered
sun-dried, with its one drop of concentrated sugar, that becomes ten
of gout. No raisin-juice for us! None of their too-long-on-the-stem
clusters! We are for the blood of the grape in her youth, her
heaven-kissing ardour. I have a cellar charged with the bravest of the
Rhine. We--will we not assail it, bleed it in the gallant days to come?
we two!' The picture of his bride and him drinking the sun down after
a day of savage toil was in the shout--a burst unnoticed in the
incessantly verbalizing buzz of a continental supper-table. Clotilde
acquiesced: she chimed to it like a fair boonfellow of the rollicking
faun. She was realizing fairyland.

They retired to the divan-corner where it was you-and-I between them
as with rivulets meeting and branching, running parallel, uniting and
branching again, divided by the theme, but unending in the flow of the
harmony. So ran their chirping arguments and diversions. The carrying
on of a prolonged and determined you-and-I in company intimates to those