‘Then,’ the officer’s voice was earnest, ’I pity him, and you no less, while you remain strangers, for you were made for one another.  Those ideas you have expressed, nay, the very words, are Alvan’s:  I have heard him use them.  He has just the same original views of society and history as yours; they’re identical; your features are not unlike . . . you talk alike:  I could fancy your voice the sister of his.  You look incredulous?  You were speaking of Pompeius, and you said “Plutarch’s Pompeius,” and more for it is almost incredible under the supposition that you do not know and have never listened to Alvan—­you said that Pompeius appeared to have been decorated with all the gifts of the Gods to make the greater sacrifice of him to Caesar, who was not personally worth a pretty woman’s “bite.”  Come, now—­you must believe me:  at a supper at Alvan’s table the other night, the talk happened to be of a modern Caesar, which led to the real one, and from him to “Plutarch’s Pompeius,” as Alvan called him; and then he said of him what you have just said, absolutely the same down to the allusion to the bite.  I assure you.  And you have numbers of little phrases in common:  you are partners in aphorisms:  Barriers are for those who cannot fly:  that is Alvan’s.  I could multiply them if I could remember; they struck me as you spoke.’

‘I must be a shameless plagiarist,’ said Clotilde.

‘Or he,’ said Count Kollin.

It is here the place of the Chorus to state that these:  ideas were in the air at the time; sparks of the Vulcanic smithy at work in politics and pervading literature:  which both Alvan and Clotilde might catch and give out as their own, in the honest belief that the epigram was, original to them.  They were not members of a country where literature is confined to its little paddock, without, influence on the larger field (part lawn, part marsh) of the social world:  they were readers in sympathetic action with thinkers and literary artists.  Their saying in common, ’Plutarch’s Pompeius,’ may be traceable to a reading of some professorial article on the common portrait-painting of the sage of Chaeroneia.  The dainty savageness in the ‘bite’ Plutarch mentions, evidently struck on a similarity of tastes in both, as it has done with others.  And in regard to Caesar, Clotilde thought much of Caesar; she had often wished that Caesar (for the additional pleasure in thinking of him) had been endowed with the beauty of his rival:  one or two of Plutarch’s touches upon the earlier history of Pompeius had netted her fancy, faintly (your generosity must be equal to hearing it) stung her blood; she liked the man; and if he had not been beaten in the end, she would have preferred him femininely.  His name was not written Pompey to her, as in English, to sound absurd:  it was a note of grandeur befitting great and lamentable fortunes, which the young lady declined to share solely because of her attraction to the victor, her compulsion to render unto the victor the sunflower’s homage.  She rendered it as a slave:  the splendid man beloved to ecstasy by the flower of Roman women was her natural choice.