He could give and take from opposition.  And rightly so, seeing that he confessed to his own bent for sarcastically stinging:  he was therefore bound to endure a retort.  Speech for speech, pamphlet for pamphlet, he could be temperate.  Nay, he defied an adversary to produce in him the sensation of intemperateness; so there would not be much danger of his being excited to betray it.  Shadowily he thought of the hard words hurled at him by the Rudigers, and of the injury Clotilde’s father did him by plotting to rob him of his daughter.  But how had an Alvan replied?—­with the arts of peaceful fence victoriously.  He conceived of no temptation to his repressed irascibility save the political.  A day might come for him and the vehement old Ironer to try their mettle in a tussle.  On that day he would have to be wary, but, as Alvan felt assured, he would be more master of himself than his antagonist.  He was for the young world, in the brain of a new order of things; the other based his unbending system on the visions of a feudal chief, and would win a great step perchance, but there he would stop:  he was not with the future!

This immediate prospect of a return to serenity after his recent charioteering, had set him thinking of himself and his days to come, which hung before him in a golden haze that was tranquillizing.  He had a name, he had a station:  he wanted power and he saw it approaching.

He wanted a wife too.  Colonel von Tresten took coffee with him previous to the start with Dr. Storchel to General von Rudiger’s house.  Alvan consequently was unable any longer to think of a wife in the abstract.  He wanted Clotilde.  Here was a man going straight to her, going to see her, positively to see her and hear her voice!—­almost instantly to hear her voice, and see her eyes and hair, touch her hand.  Oh! and rally her, rouse her wit; and be able to tell him the flower she wore for the day, and where she wore it—­at her temples, or sliding to the back hair, or in her bosom, or at her waist!  She had innumerable tricks of indication in these shifty pretty ways of hers, and was full of varying speech to the cunning reader of her.

‘But keep her to seriousness,’ Alvan said.  ’Our meeting must be early to-day—­early in the afternoon.  She is not unlikely to pretend to trifle.  She has not seen me for some time, and will probably enough play at emancipation and speak of the “singular impatience of the seigneur Alvan.”  Don’t you hear her?  I swear to those very words!  She “loves her liberty,” and she curves her fan and taps her foot.  “The seigneur Alvan appears pressed for time:”  She has “letters to write to friends to-day.”  Stop that!  I can’t join in play:  to-morrow, if she likes; not to-day.  Or not till I have her by the hand.  She shall be elf and fairy, French coquette, whatever she pleases to-morrow, and I’ll be satisfied.  All I beg is for plain dealing on a business matter.  This is a business matter,