“And so we relinquish Alfieri for Florian!  There’s a sentimental burlesque at once!” the youth ejaculated, in gloom.  “I chose this subject entirely to give you Rome for a theme.”

Emilia took his hand.  “I do thank you.  If Brennus has a daughter, why not let her be half Roman?”

Tracy fired out:  “she’s a bony woman, with a brawny development; mammoth haunches, strong of the skeleton; cheek-bones, flat-forward, as a fish ’s rotting on a beach; long scissor lips-nippers to any wretched rose of a kiss! a pugilist’s nose to the nostrils of a phoca; and eyes!—­don’t you see them?—­luminaries of pestilence; blotted yellow, like a tallow candle shining through a horny lantern.”

At this horrible forced-poetic portrait, Emilia cried in pain:  “You hate her suddenly!”

“I loathe the creature—­pah!” went Tracy.

“Why do you make her so hideous?” Emilia complained.  “I feel myself hating her too.  Look at me.  Am I such a thing as that?”

“You!” Tracy was melted in a trice, and gave the motion of hugging, as a commentary on his private opinion.

“Can you also be sure that Camillus can love nothing but his country?  Would one love stop the other?” she persisted, gazing with an air of steady anxiety for the answer.

“There isn’t a doubt about it,” said Tracy.

Emilia caught her face in her hands, and exclaimed in a stifling voice:  “It’s true! it’s true!”

Tracy saw that her figure was shaken with sobs—­unmistakeable, hard, sorrowful convulsions.

“Confound historical facts that make her cry!” he murmured to himself, in a fury at the Roman fables.  “It’s no use comforting her with Niebuhr now.  She’s got a live Camillus in her brain, and there he’ll stick.”  Tracy began to mutter the emphatic D.; quite cognizant of her case, as he supposed.  This intensity of human emotion about a dry faggot of history by no means surprised him; and he was as tender to the grief of his darling little friend as if he had known the conflict that tore her in two.  Subsequently he related the incident, in a tone of tender delight, to Wilfrid, whom it smote.  “Am I a brute?” asked the latter of the Intelligences in the seat of his consciousness, and they for the moment gravely affirmed it.  I have observed that when young men obtain this mental confirmation of their suspicions, they wax less reluctant to act as brutes than when the doubt restrained them.

He reasoned thus:  “I can bring my mind to the idea of losing her, if it must be so.” (Hear, hear! from the unanimous internal Parliament.) “But I can’t make her miserable (cheers)—­I can’t go and break her heart” (loud cheers, drowning a faint dissentient hum).—­The scene, of which Tracy had told him, gave Wilfrid a kind of dread of the girl.  If that was her state of feeling upon a distant subject, how would it be when he applied the knife.  Simply, impossible to use the knife at all!  Wield it thou, O Circumstance, babe-munching Chronos, whosoever thou art, that jarrest our poor human music effectually from hour to hour!