Could Prince Marko be he, soft as he was, pliable, a docile infant, burning to please her, enraptured in obeying?—­the hero who would wrestle with her, overcome and hold her bound?  Siegfried could not be dreamed in him, or a Siegfried’s baby son-in-arms.  She caught a glorious image of the woman rejecting him and his rival, and it informed her that she, dissatisfied with an Adonis, and more than a match for a famous conqueror, was a woman of decisive and independent, perhaps unexampled, force of character.  Her idea of a spiritual superiority that could soar over those two men, the bad and the good—­the bad because of his vileness, the good because of his frailness—­whispered to her of deserving, possibly of attracting, the best of men:  the best, that is, in the woman’s view of us—­the strongest, the great eagle of men, lord of earth and air.

One who will dominate me, she thought.

Now when a young lady of lively intelligence and taking charm has brought her mind to believe that she possesses force of character, she persuades the rest of the world easily to agree with her, and so long as her pretensions are not directly opposed to their habits of thought, her parents will be the loudest in proclaiming it, fortifying so the maid’s presumption, which is ready to take root in any shadow of subserviency.  Her father was a gouty general of infantry in the diplomatic service, disinclined to unnecessary disputes, out of consideration for his vehement irritability when roused.  Her mother had been one of the beauties of her set, and was preserving an attenuated reign, through the conversational arts, to save herself from fading into the wall.  Her brothers and sisters were not of an age to contest her lead.  The temper of the period was revolutionary in society by reflection of the state of politics, and juniors were sturdy democrats, letting their elders know that they had come to their inheritance, while the elders, confused by the impudent topsy-turvy, put on the gaping mask (not unfamiliar to history) of the disestablished conservative, whose astounded state paralyzes his wrath.

Clotilde maintained a decent measure in the liberty she claimed, and it was exercised in wildness of dialogue rather than in capricious behaviour.  If her flowing tongue was imperfectly controlled, it was because she discoursed by preference to men upon our various affairs and tangles, and they encouraged her with the tickled wonder which bids the bold advance yet farther into bogland.  Becoming the renowned original of her society, wherever it might be, in Germany, Italy, Southern France, she grew chillily sensible of the solitude decreed for their heritage to our loftiest souls.  Her Indian Bacchus, as a learned professor supplied Prince Marko’s title for her, was a pet, not a companion.  She to him was what she sought for in another.  As much as she pitied herself for not lighting on the predestined man, she pitied him for having met the woman, so that