she could say, in her delicate scorn of his advantages and her emotions.  True gentlemen are imperfectly valued when they are under the shadow of giants; but still Clotilde’s experience of a giant’s manners was favourable to the liberty she could enjoy in a sisterly intimacy of this kind, rather warmer than her word for it would imply.  She owned that she could better live the poetic life—­that is, trifle with fire and reflect on its charms in the society of Marko.  He was very young, he was little more than an adolescent, and safely timid; a turn of her fingers would string or slacken him.  One could play on him securely, thinking of a distant day—­and some shipwreck of herself for an interlude—­when he might be made happy.

Her strangest mood of the tender cruelty was when the passion to anatomize him beset her.  The ground of it was, that she found him in her likeness, adoring as she adored, and a similar loftiness; now grovelling, now soaring; the most radiant of beings, the most abject; and the pleasure she had of the sensational comparison was in an alteregoistic home she found in him, that allowed of her gathering a picked self-knowledge, and of her saying:  ’That is like me:  that is very like me:  that is terribly like’:  up to the point where the comparison wooed her no longer with an agreeable lure of affinity, but nipped her so shrewdly as to force her to say:  ‘That is he, not I’:  and the vivisected youth received the caress which quickened him to wholeness at a touch.  It was given with impulsive tenderness, in pity of him.  Anatomy is the title for the operation, because the probing of herself in another, with the liberty to cease probing as soon as it hurt her, allowed her while unhurt to feel that she prosecuted her researches in a dead body.  The moment her strong susceptibility to the likeness shrank under a stroke of pain, she abstained from carving, and simultaneously conscious that he lived, she was kind to him.

‘This love of yours, Marko—­is it so deep?’

‘I love you.’

‘You think me the highest and best?’

‘You are.’

‘So deep that you could bear anything from me?’

‘Try me!’

‘Unfaithfulness?’

‘You would be you!’

‘Do you not say that because you cannot suspect evil of me?’

‘Let me only see you!’

‘You are sure that happiness would not smother it?’

‘Has it done so yet?’

‘Though you know I am a serpent to that man’s music?’

‘Ah, heaven!  Oh!—­do not say music.  Yes! though anything!’

‘And if ever you were to witness the power of his just breathing to me?’

‘I would . . . .  Ah!’

’What?  If you saw his music working the spell?—­even the first notes of his prelude!’

‘I would wait’

‘It might be for long.’

‘I would eat my heart.’

‘Bitter! bitter!’

‘I would wait till he flung you off, and kneel to you.’