‘Pyrrha, Lydia, Lalage, Chloe, Glycera,’ Alvan murmured, amorous of the musical names.  ’Clotilde is a Greek of one of the Isles, an Ionian.  I see her in the Horatian ode as in one of those old round shield-mirrors which give you a speck of the figure on a silver-solar beam, brilliant, not much bigger than a dewdrop.  And so should a man’s heart reflect her!  Take her on the light in it, she is perfection.  We won’t take her in the shady part or on your flat looking-glasses.  There never was necessity for accuracy of line in the portraiture of women.  The idea of them is all we want:  it’s the best of them.  You will own she’s Greek; she’s a Perinthian, Andrian, Olythian, Saurian, Messenian.  One of those delicious girls in the New Comedy, I remember, was called the postponer, the deferrer, or, as we might say, the to-MORROWER.  There you have Clotilde:  she’s a to-MORROWER.  You climb the peak of to-morrow, and to see her at all you must see her on the next peak:  but she leaves you her promise to hug on every yesterday, and that keeps you going.  Ay, so we have patience!  Feeding on a young woman’s promises of yesterday in one’s fortieth year!—­it must end to-morrow, though I kill something.’

Kill, he meant, the aerial wild spirit he could admire as her character, when he had the prospect of extinguishing it in his grasp.

‘What do you meditate killing?’ said the baroness.

‘The fool of the years behind me,’ he replied, ’and entering on my forty-first a sage.’

‘To be the mate and equal of your companion?’

’To prove I have had good training under the wisest to act as her guide and master.’

‘If she—­’ the baroness checked her exclamation, saying:  ’She declined to come to me.  I would have plumbed her for some solid ground, something to rest one’s faith on.  Your Pyrrhas, Glyceras, and others of the like, were not stable persons for a man of our days to bind his life to one of them.  Harness is harness, and a light yoke-fellow can make a proud career deviate.’

‘But I give her a soul!’ said Alvan.  ’I am the wine, and she the crystal cup.  She has avowed it again and again.  You read her as she is when away from me.  Then she is a reed, a weed, what you will; she is unfit to contend when she stands alone.  But when I am beside her, when we are together—­the moment I have her at arms’ length she will be part of me by the magic I have seen each time we encountered.  She knows it well.’

‘She may know it too well.’

‘For what?’ He frowned.

‘For the chances of your meeting.’

‘You think it possible she will refuse?’

A blackness passing to lividness crossed his face.  He fetched a big breath.