’The kisses were in the course of things,
               The bite was a needless addition.’

Clotilde could not repress her reddening—­Count Kollin had repeated too much!  She dropped her eyes, with a face of sculpture, then resumed their chatter.  He spared her the allusion to Pompeius.  She convinced him of her capacity for reserve besides intrepidity, and flattered him too with her blush.  She could dare to say to Kollin what her scarlet sensibility forbade her touching on with him:  not that she would not have had an airy latitude with him to touch on what she pleased:  he liked her for her boldness and the cold peeping of the senses displayed in it:  he liked also the distinction she made.

The cry to supper conduced to a further insight of her adaptation to his requirements in a wife.  They marched to the table together, and sat together, and drank a noble Rhine wine together—­true Rauenthal.  His robustness of body and soul inspired the wish that his well-born wife might 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.