soul by influx, and draw forth the troubled from its prickly nest!—­Well, and you are my sunlighted land.  And you will have to be fought for.  And I see not the less repose in the prospect!  Part of you may be shifty-sand.  The sands are famous for their golden shining—­as you shine.  Well, then, we must make the quicksands concrete.  I have a perfect faith in you, and in the winning of you.  Clearly you will have to be fought for.  I should imagine it a tough battle to come.  But as I doubt neither you nor myself, I see beyond it.—­We use phrases in common, and aphorisms, it appears.  Why? but that our minds act in unison.  What if I were to make a comparison of you with Paris?—­the city of Paris, Lutetia.’

‘Could you make it good?’ said Clotilde.

He laughed and postponed it for a series of skimming discussions, like swallow-flights from the nest beneath the eaves to the surface of the stream, perpetually reverting to her, and provoking spirited replies, leading her to fly with him in expectation of a crowning compliment that must be singular and was evidently gathering confirmation in his mind from the touchings and probings of her character on these flights.

She was like a lady danced off her sense of fixity, to whom the appearance of her whirling figure in the mirror is both wonderful and reassuring; and she liked to be discussed, to be compared to anything, for the sake of being the subject, so as to be sure it was she that listened to a man who was a stranger, claiming her for his own; sure it was she that by not breaking from him implied consent, she that went speeding in this magical rapid round which slung her more and more out of her actual into her imagined self, compelled her to proceed, denied her the right to faint and call upon the world for aid, and catch at it, though it was close by and at a signal would stop the terrible circling.  The world was close by and had begun to stare.  She half apprehended that fact, but she was in the presence of the irresistible.  In the presence of the irresistible the conventional is a crazy structure swept away with very little creaking of its timbers on the flood.  When we feel its power we are immediately primitive creatures, flying anywhere in space, indifferent to nakedness.  And after trimming ourselves for it, the sage asks your permission to add, it will be the thing we are most certain some day to feel.  Had not she trimmed herself?—­so much that she had won fame for an originality mistaken by her for the independent mind, and perilously, for courage.  She had trimmed herself and Alvan too—­herself to meet it, and Alvan to be it.  Her famous originality was a trumpet blown abroad proclaiming her the prize of the man who sounded as loudly his esteem for the quality—­in a fair young woman of good breeding.  Each had evoked the other.  Their common anticipations differed in this, that he had expected comeliness, she the reverse—­an Esau of the cities; and seeing superb manly beauty in the place of the thick-featured sodden satyr of her miscreating fancy, the irresistible was revealed to her on its divinest whirlwind.