of trooping hosts is an incentive to taste to try for yourself.  Men (the jury of householders empanelled to deliver verdicts upon the ways of women) can almost understand that.  And as it happens, tasting before you have sounded the sense of your taste will frequently mislead by a step or two difficult to retrieve:  the young coquette must then be cruel, as necessarily we kick the waters to escape drowning:  and she is not in all cases dealing with simple blocks or limp festoons, she comes upon veteran tricksters that have a knowledge of her sex, capable of outfencing her nascent individuality.  The more imagination she has, for a source of strength in the future days, the more is she a prey to the enemy in her time of ignorance.

Clotilde’s younger maiden hours and their love episodes are wrapped in the mists Diana considerately drops over her adventurous favourites.  She was not under a French mother’s rigid supervision.  In France the mother resolves that her daughter shall be guarded from the risks of that unequal rencounter between foolish innocence and the predatory.  Vigilant foresight is not so much practised where the world is less accurately comprehended.  Young people of Clotilde’s upper world everywhere, and the young women of it especially, are troubled by an idea drawn from what they inhale and guess at in the spirituous life surrounding them, that the servants of the devil are the valiant host, this world’s elect, getting and deserving to get the best it can give in return for a little dashing audacity, a flavour of the Fronde in their conduct; they sin, but they have the world; and then they repent perhaps, but they have had the world.  The world is the golden apple.  Thirst for it is common during youth:  and one would think the French mother worthy of the crown of wisdom if she were not so scrupulously provident in excluding love from the calculations on behalf of her girl.

Say (for Diana’s mists are impenetrable and freeze curiosity) that Clotilde was walking with Count Constantine, the brilliant Tartar trained in Paris, when first she met Prince Marko Romaris, at the Hungarian Baths on the borders of the Styrian highlands.  The scene at all events is pretty, and weaves a fable out of a variety of floating threads.  A stranger to the Baths, dressed in white and scarlet, sprang from his carriage into a group of musical gypsies round an inn at the arch of the chestnut avenue, after pulling up to listen to them for a while.  The music had seized him.  He snatched bow and fiddle from one of the ring, and with a few strokes kindled their faces.  Then seating himself, on a bench he laid the fiddle on his knee, and pinched the strings and flung up his voice, not ceasing to roll out the spontaneous notes when Clotilde and her cavalier, and other couples of the party, came nigh; for he was on the tide of the song, warm in it, and loved it too well to suffer intruders to break the flow, or to think of them.  They were close by when the last of it rattled (it was a popular song of a fiery tribe) to its finish:  He rose and saluted Clotilde, smiled and jumped back to his carriage, sending a cry of adieu to the swarthy, lank-locked, leather-hued circle, of which his dark oriental eyes and skin of burnished walnut made him look an offshoot, but one of the celestial branch.