Be sure that she knew who he was.  No, says she.  But she knew.  It terrified her soul to think he was Alvan.  She feared scarcely less that it might not be he.  Between these dreads of doubt and belief she played at cat and mouse with herself, escaped from cat, persecuted mouse, teased herself, and gloated.  It is he! not he! he! not he! most certainly! impossible!—­And then it ran:  If he, oh me!  If another, woe me!  For she had come to see Alvan.  Alvan and she shared ideas.  They talked marvellously alike, so as to startle Count Kollin:  and supposing he was not Alvan, it would be a bitter disappointment.  The supposition that he was, threatened her with instant and life-long bondage.

Then again, could that face be the face of a Jew?  She feasted.  It was a noble profile, an ivory skin, most lustrous eyes.  Perchance a Jew of the Spanish branch of the exodus, not the Polish.  There is the noble Jew as well as the bestial Gentile.  There is not in the sublimest of Gentiles a majesty comparable to that of the Jew elect.  He may well think his race favoured of heaven, though heaven chastise them still.  The noble Jew is grave in age, but in his youth he is the arrow to the bow of his fiery eastern blood, and in his manhood he is—­ay, what you see there! a figure of easy and superb preponderance, whose fire has mounted to inspirit and be tempered by the intellect.

She was therefore prepared all the while for the surprise of learning that the gentleman so unlike a Jew was Alvan; and she was prepared to express her recordation of the circumstance in her diary with phrases of very eminent surprise.  Necessarily it would be the greatest of surprises.

The three, this man and his two of the tribe, upon whom Clotilde’s attention centred, with a comparison in her mind too sacred to be other than profane (comparisons will thrust themselves on minds disordered), dropped to the cushions of the double-seated sofa, by one side of which she cowered over her wool-work, willing to dwindle to a pin’s head if her insignificance might enable her to hear the words of the speaker.  He pursued his talk:  there was little danger of not hearing him.  There was only the danger of feeling too deeply the spell of his voice.  His voice had the mellow fulness of the clarionet.  But for the subject, she could have fancied a noontide piping of great Pan by the sedges.  She had never heard a continuous monologue so musical, so varied in music, amply flowing, vivacious, interwovenly the brook, the stream, the torrent:  a perfect natural orchestra in a single instrument.  He had notes less pastorally imageable, notes that fired the blood, with the ranging of his theme.  The subject became clearer to her subjugated wits, until the mental vivacity he roused on certain impetuous phrases of assertion caused her pride to waken up and rebel as she took a glance at herself, remembering that she likewise was a thinker, deemed in her society an original thinker, an intrepid thinker and talker, not so very much beneath this man in audacity of brain, it might be.  He kindled her thus, and the close-shut but expanded and knew the fretting desire to breathe out the secret within it, and be appreciated in turn.