I did a ludicrous and a shameful thing, knowing it in advance to be a barren farce.  I obeyed his wish.  The tale will be laughable.  I obeyed him.  I would not have it on my conscience that the commission of any deed ennomic, however unwonted, was refused by me to serve Alvan.  You are my witness, Tresten, that for a young woman of common honesty I was ready to pack and march.  Qualities of mind-mind!  They were out of the question.  He had a taste for a wife.  If he had hit on a girl commonly honest, she might not have harmed him—­the contrary; cut his talons.  What is this girl?  Exactly what one might be sure his appreciation, in woman-flesh, would lead him to fix on; a daughter of the Philistines, naturally, and precisely the one of all on earth likely to confound him after marriage as she has played fast and loose with him before it.  He has never understood women—­cannot read them.  Could a girl like that keep a secret?  She’s a Cressida—­a creature of every camp!  Not an idea of the cause he is vowed to! not a sentiment in harmony with it!  She is viler than any of those Berlin light o’ loves on the eve of Jena.  Stable as a Viennese dancing slut home from Mariazell!  This is the girl-transparent to the whole world!  But his heart is on her, and he must have her, I suppose; and I shall have to bear her impertinences, or sign my demission and cease to labour for the cause at least in conjunction with Alvan.  And how other wise?  He is the life of it, and I am doomed to uselessness.’

Tresten nodded a protesting assent.

‘Not quite so bad,’ he said, with the encouraging smile which could persuade a friend to put away bilious visions.  ’Of the two, if you two are divisible, we could better dispense with him.  She’ll slip him, she’s an eel.  I have seen eels twine on a prong of the fork that prods them; but she’s an actress, a slippery one through and through, with no real embrace in her, not even a common muscular contraction.  Of every camp! as you say.  She was not worth carrying off.  I consented to try it to quiet him.  He sets no bounds to his own devotion to friendship, and we must take pattern by him.  It’s a mad love.’

‘A Titan’s love!’ the baroness exclaimed, groaning.  ’The woman!—­no matter how or at what cost!  I can admire that primal barbarism of a great man’s passion, which counts for nothing the stains and accidents fraught with extinction for it to meaner men.  It reads ill, it sounds badly, but there is grand stuff in it.  See the royalty of the man, for whom no degradation of the woman can be, so long as it brings her to him!  He—­that great he—­covers all.  He burns her to ashes, and takes the flame—­the pure spirit of her—­to himself.  Were men like him!—­they would have less to pardon.  We must, as I have ever said, be morally on alpine elevations to comprehend Alvan; he is Mont Blanc above his fellows.  Do not ask him to be considerate of her.  She has planted him in a storm, and