Prince Marko did what he could to please her; he knew something of the rumours about Alvan and the baroness.  But why should his lady trouble herself for particulars of such people, whom it could scarcely be supposed she would meet by accident?  He asked her this.  Clotilde said it was common curiosity.  She read him a short lecture on the dismal narrowness of their upper world; and on the advantage of taking an interest in the world below them and more enlightened; a world where ideas were current and speech was wine.  The prince nodded; if she had these opinions, it must be good for him to have them too, and he shared them, as it were, by the touch of her hand, and for the length of time that he touched her hand, as an electrical shock may be taken by one far removed from the battery, susceptible to it only through the link; he was capable of thinking all that came to him from her a blessing—­shocks, wounds and disruptions.  He did not add largely to her stock of items, nor did he fetch new colours.  The telegraph wire was his model of style.  He was more or less a serviceless Indian Bacchus, standing for sign of the beauty and vacuity of their world:  and how dismally narrow that world was, she felt with renewed astonishment at every dive out of her gold-fish pool into the world of tides below; so that she was ready to scorn the cultivation of the graces, and had, when not submitting to the smell, fanciful fits of a liking for tobacco smoke—­the familiar incense of those homes where speech was wine.

At last she fell to the asking of herself whether, in the same city with him, often among his friends, hearing his latest intimate remarks—­things homely redolent of him as hot bread of the oven—­she was ever to meet this man upon whom her thoughts were bent to the eclipse of all others.  She desired to meet him for comparison’s sake, and to criticize a popular hero.  It was inconceivable that any one popular could approach her standard, but she was curious; flame played about him; she had some expectation of easing a spiteful sentiment created by the recent subjection of her thoughts to the prodigious little Jew; and some feeling of closer pity for Prince Marko she had, which urged her to be rid of her delusion as to the existence of a wonder-working man on our earth, that she might be sympathetically kind to the prince, perhaps compliant, and so please her parents, be good and dull, and please everybody, and adieu to dreams, good night, and so to sleep with the beasts! . . .

Calling one afternoon on a new acquaintance of the flat table-land she liked tripping down to from her heights, Clotilde found the lady in supreme toilette, glowing, bubbling:  ‘Such a breakfast, my dear!’ The costly profusion, the anecdotes, the wit, the fun, the copious draughts of the choicest of life—­was there ever anything to match it?  Never in that lady’s recollection, or her husband’s either, she exclaimed.  And where was the breakfast?  Why, at Alvan’s, to be sure; where else could such a breakfast be?