‘No, they attend to their duties,’ he assented generally, desperately just.

‘And you owe it to her that you have seen me.’

‘I do,’ he said, and forthwith courted the lady to be forgiven.

Clotilde was taken from him in a heavy downpour and trailing of mists.

At the foot of the mountain a boy handed her a letter from Alvan—­a burning flood, rolled out of him like lava after they had separated on the second plateau, and confided to one who knew how to outstrip pathfarers.  She entered her hotel across the lake, and met a telegram.  At night the wires flashed ‘Sleep well’ to her; on her awakening, ’Good morning.’  A lengthened history of the day was telegraphed for her amusement.  Again at night there was a ‘God guard you!’

‘Who can resist him?’ sighed Clotilde, excited, nervous, flattered, happy, but yearning to repose and be curtained from the buzz of the excess of life that he put about her.  This time there was no prospect of his courtship relapsing.

‘He is a wonderful, an ideal lover!’ replied her friend.

‘If he were only that!’ said Clotilde, musing expressively.  ’If, dear Englishwoman, he were only that, he might be withstood.  But Alvan mounts high over such lovers:  he is a wonderful and ideal man:  so great, so generous, heroical, giant-like, that what he wills must be.’

The Englishwoman was quick enough to seize an indication difficult to miss—­more was expected to be said of him.

‘You see the perfect gentleman in Dr. Alvan,’ she remarked, for she had heard him ordering his morning bath at the hotel, and he had also been polite to her under vexation.

Clotilde nodded hurriedly; she saw something infinitely greater, and disliked the bringing of that island microscope to bear upon a giant.  She found it repugnant to hear a word of Alvan as a perfect gentleman.  Justly, however, she took him for a splendid nature, and assuming upon good authority that the greater contains the lesser, she supposed the lesser to be a chiselled figure serviceably alive in the embrace.

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: 

Barriers are for those who cannot fly
Be good and dull, and please everybody
Centres of polished barbarism known as aristocratic societies
Clotilde fenced, which is half a confession
Comparisons will thrust themselves on minds disordered
Compromise is virtual death
Conservative, whose astounded state paralyzes his wrath
Creatures that wait for circumstances to bring the change
Dissent rings out finely, and approval is a feeble murmur
Do you judge of heroes as of lesser men? 
Empanelled to deliver verdicts upon the ways of women
Fantastical
Finishing touches to the negligence
Gone to pieces with an injured lover’s babble
Gradations appear to be unknown to you
He had to go, he must, he has to be always going