So far, as far as she can be portrayed introductorily, she is not without exemplars in the sex.  Young women have been known to turn from us altogether, never to turn back, so poor and shrunken, or so fleshly-bulgy have we all appeared in the fairy jacket they wove for the right one of us to wear becomingly.  But the busy great world was round Clotilde while she was malleable, though she might be losing her fresh ideas of the hammer and the block, and that is a world of much solicitation to induce a vivid girl to merge an ideal in a living image.  Supposing, when she has accomplished it, that men justify her choice, the living will retain the colours of the ideal.  We have it on record that he may seem an eagle.

‘You talk curiously like Alvan, do you know,’ a gentleman of her country said to her as they were descending the rock of Capri, one day.  He said it musingly.

He belonged to a circle beneath her own:  the learned and artistic.  She had not heard of this Alvan, or had forgotten him; but professing universal knowledge, especially of celebrities, besides having an envious eye for that particular circle, which can pretend to be the choicest of all, she was unwilling to betray her ignorance, and she dimpled her cheek, as one who had often heard the thing said to her before.  She smiled musingly.

CHAPTER II

‘Who is the man they call Alvan?’ She put the question at the first opportunity to an aunt of hers.

Up went five-fingered hands.  This violent natural sign of horror was comforting:  she saw that he was a celebrity indeed.

’Alvan!  My dear Clotilde!  What on earth can you want to know about a creature who is the worst of demagogues, a disreputable person, and a Jew!’

Clotilde remarked that she had asked only who he was.  ‘Is he clever?’

’He is one of the basest of those wretches who are for upsetting the Throne and Society to gratify their own wicked passions:  that is what he is.’

‘But is he clever?’

’Able as Satan himself, they say.  He is a really dangerous, bad man.  You could not have been curious about a worse one.’

‘Politically, you mean.’

‘Of course I do.’

The lady had not thought of any other kind of danger from a man of that station.

The likening of one to Satan does not always exclude meditation upon him.  Clotilde was anxious to learn in what way her talk resembled Alvan’s.  He being that furious creature, she thought of herself at her wildest, which was in her estimation her best; and consequently, she being by no means a furious creature, though very original, she could not meditate on him without softening the outlines given him by report; all because of the likeness between them; and, therefore, as she had knowingly been taken for furious by very foolish people, she settled it that Alvan was also a victim of the prejudices he scorned.  It had pleased her at times to scorn our prejudices and feel the tremendous weight she brought on herself by the indulgence.  She drew on her recollections of the Satanic in her bosom when so situated, and never having admired herself more ardently than when wearing that aspect, she would have admired the man who had won the frightful title in public, except for one thing—­he was a Jew.