endowment was rarer:  still rarer the moral audacity.  O, to match this man’s embracing discursiveness! his ardour, his complacent energy, the full strong sound he brought out of all subjects!  He struck, and they rang.  There was a bell in everything for him; Nature gave out her cry, and significance was on all sides of the universe; no dead stuff, no longer any afflicting lumpishness.  His brain was vivifying light.  And how humane he was! how supremely tolerant!  Where she had really thought instead of flippantly tapping at the doors of thought, or crying vagrantly for an echo, his firm footing in the region thrilled her; and where she had felt deeper than fancifully, his wise tenderness overwhelmed.  Strange to consider:  with all his precious gifts, which must make the gift of life thrice dear to him, he was fearless.  Less by what he said than by divination she discerned that he knew not fear.  If for only that, she would have hung to him like his shadow.  She could have detected a brazen pretender.  A meaner mortal vaunting his great stores she would have written down coxcomb.  Her social training and natural perception raised her to a height to measure the bombastical and distinguish it from the eloquently lofty.  He spoke of himself, as the towering Alp speaks out at a first view, bidding that which he was be known.  Fearless, confident, able, he could not but be, as he believed himself, indomitable.  She who was this man’s mate would consequently wed his possessions, including courage.  Clotilde at once reached the conclusion of her having it in an equal degree.  Was she not displaying it?  The worthy people of the company stared, as she now perceived, and she was indifferent; her relatives were present without disturbing her exaltation.  She wheeled above their heads in the fiery chariot beside her sun-god.  It could not but be courage, active courage, superior to her previous tentative steps—­the verbal temerities she had supposed so dauntless.  For now she was in action, now she was being tried to match the preacher and incarnation of the virtues of action!

Alvan shaped a comparison of her with Paris, his beloved of cities—­the symbolized goddess of the lightning brain that is quick to conceive, eager to realize ideas, impassioned for her hero, but ever putting him to proof, graceful beyond all rhyme, colloquial as never the Muse; light in light hands, yet valiant unto death for a principle; and therefore not light, anything but light in strong hands, very stedfast rather:  and oh! constantly entertaining.

The comparison had to be strained to fit the living lady’s shape.  Did he think it, or a dash of something like it?