His mood was luxurious.  He had found the fair and youthful original woman of refinement and station desired by him.  He had good reason to wish to find her.  Having won a name, standing on firm ground, with promise of a great career, chief of what was then taken for a growing party and is not yet a collapsed, nor will be, though the foot on it is iron, his youth had flown under the tutelage of an extraordinary Mentor, whom to call Athene robs the goddess of her personal repute for wisdom in conduct, but whose head was wise, wise as it was now grey.  Verily she was original; and a grey original should seem remarkable above a blooming blonde.  If originality in woman were our prime request, the grey should bear the palm.  She has gone through the battle, retaining the standard she carried into it, which is a victory.  Alas, that grey, so spirit-touching in Art, should be so wintry in reality!

The discovery of a feminine original breathing Spring, softer, warmer than the ancient one, gold instead of snowcrested, and fully as intrepid as devoted, was an immense joy to Alvan.  He took it luxuriously because he believed in his fortune, a kind of natal star, the common heritage of the adventurous, that brought him his good things in time, in return for energetic strivings in a higher direction apart from his natural longings.

Fortune had delayed, he had wintered long.  All the sweeter was the breath of the young Spring.  That exquisite new sweetness robed Clotilde in the attributes of the person dreamed of for his mate; and deductively assuming her to possess them, he could not doubt his power of winning her.  Barriers are for those who cannot fly.  The barriers were palpable about a girl of noble Christian birth:  so was the courage in her which would give her wings, he thought, coming to that judgement through the mixture of his knowledge of himself and his perusal of her exterior.  He saw that she could take an impression deeply enough to express it sincerely, and he counted on it, sympathetically endowing her with his courage to support the originality she was famed for.

They were interrupted between-whiles by weariful men running to Alvan for counsel on various matters—­how to play their game, or the exact phrasing of some pregnant sentence current in politics or literature.  He satisfied them severally and shouldered them away, begging for peace that night.  Clotilde corroborated his accurate recital of the lines of a contested verse of the incomparable Heinrich, and they fell to capping verses of the poet-lucid metheglin, with here and there no dubious flavour of acid, and a lively sting in the tail of the honey.  Sentiment, cynicism, and satin impropriety and scabrous, are among those verses, where pure poetry has a recognized voice; but the lower elements constitute the popularity in a cultivated society inclining to wantonness out of bravado as well as by taste.  Alvan, looking indolently royal and royally roguish, quoted a verse that speaks of the superfluousness of a faithless lady’s vowing bite: