to a flow of rhetoric.  She could prattle deliciously, at times pointedly, relying on her intuition to tell her more than we get from books, and on her sweet impudence for a richer original strain.  She began to appreciate now a reputation for profound acquirements.  Learned professors of jurisprudence and history were as enthusiastic for Alvan in their way as Count Kollin.  She heard things related of Alvan by the underbreath.  That circle below her own, the literary and artistic, idolized him; his talk, his classic breakfasts and suppers, his undisguised ambition, his indomitable energy, his dauntlessness and sway over her sex, were subjects of eulogy all round her; and she heard of an enamoured baroness.  No one blamed Alvan.  He had shown his chivalrous valour in defending her.  The baroness was not a young woman, and she was a hardbound Blue.  She had been the first to discover the prodigy, and had pruned, corrected, and published him; he was one of her political works, promising to be the most successful.  An old affair apparently; but the association of a woman’s name with Alvan’s, albeit the name of a veteran, roused the girl’s curiosity, leading her to think his mental and magnetic powers must be of the very highest, considering his physical repulsiveness, for a woman of rank to yield him such extreme devotion.  She commissioned her princely serving-man, who had followed and was never far away from her, to obtain precise intelligence of this notorious Alvan.

Prince Marko did what he could to please her; he knew something of the rumours about Alvan and the baroness.  But why should his lady trouble herself for particulars of such people, whom it could scarcely be supposed she would meet by accident?  He asked her this.  Clotilde said it was common curiosity.  She read him a short lecture on the dismal narrowness of their upper world; and on the advantage of taking an interest in the world below them and more enlightened; a world where ideas were current and speech was wine.  The prince nodded; if she had these opinions, it must be good for him to have them too, and he shared them, as it were, by the touch of her hand, and for the length of time that he touched her hand, as an electrical shock may be taken by one far removed from the battery, susceptible to it only through the link; he was capable of thinking all that came to him from her a blessing—­shocks, wounds and disruptions.  He did not add largely to her stock of items, nor did he fetch new colours.  The telegraph wire was his model of style.  He was more or less a serviceless Indian Bacchus, standing for sign of the beauty and vacuity of their world:  and how dismally narrow that world was, she felt with renewed astonishment at every dive out of her gold-fish pool into the world of tides below; so that she was ready to scorn the cultivation of the graces, and had, when not submitting to the smell, fanciful fits of a liking for tobacco smoke—­the familiar incense of those homes where speech was wine.