‘Keep so,’ said the baroness.

He walked to where the strenuous blue lake, finding outlet, propels a shoulder, like a bright-muscled athlete in action, and makes the Rhone-stream.  There he stood for an hour, disfevered by the limpid liquid tumult, inspirited by the glancing volumes of a force that knows no abatement, and is the skiey Alps behind, the great historic citied plains ahead.

His meditation ended with a resolution half in the form of a prayer (to mixed deities undefined) never to ask for a small thing any more if this one were granted him!

He had won it, of course, having brought all his powers to bear on the task; and he rejoiced in winning it:  his heart leapt, his imagination spun radiant webs of colour:  but he was a little ashamed of his frenzies, though he did not distinctly recall them; he fancied he had made some noise, loud or not, because his intentions were so pure that it was infamous to thwart them.  At a certain age honest men made sacrifice of their liberty to society, and he had been ready to perform the duty of husbanding a woman.  A man should have a wife and rear children, not to be forgotten in the land, and to help mankind by transmitting to future times qualities he has proved priceless:  he thought of the children, and yearned to the generations of men physically and morally through them.

This was his apology to the world for his distantly-recollected excesses of temper.

Was she so small a thing?  Not if she succumbed.  She was petty, vexatious, irritating, stinging, while she resisted:  she cast an evil beam on his reputation, strength and knowledge of himself, and roused the giants of his nature to discharge missiles at her, justified as they were by his pure intentions and the approbation of society.  But he had a broad full heart for the woman who would come to him, forgiving her, uplifting her, richly endowing her.  No meanness of heart was in him.  He lay down at night thinking of Clotilde in an abandonment of tenderness.  ‘Tomorrow! you bird of to-morrow!’ he let fly his good-night to her.

CHAPTER XV

He slept.  Near upon morning he roused with his tender fit strong on him, but speechless in the waking as it had been dreamless in sleep.  It was a happy load on his breast, a life about to be born, and he thought that a wife beside him would give it language.  She should have, for she would call out, his thousand flitting ideas now dropped on barren ground for want of her fair bosom to inspire, to vivify, to receive.  Poetry laid a hand on him:  his desire of the wife, the children, the citizen’s good name—­of these our simple civilized ambitions—­was lowly of the earth, throbbing of earth, and at the same time magnified beyond scope of speech in vast images and emblems resembling ranges of Olympian cloud round the blue above earth, all to be decipherable, all utterable, when she was by.  What commoner word!—­yet wife seemed to him the word most reverberating of the secret sought after by man, fullest at once of fruit and of mystery, or of that light in the heart of mystery which makes it magically fruitful.