of props and jugglers’ arts, but a justice coming of the recognized needs of majorities, which will base the column on a broad plinth for safety-broad as the base of yonder mountain’s towering white immensity—­and will be the guarantee for the solid uplifting of our civilization at last.  ‘Right, thou!’ he apostrophized—­the old Ironer, at a point of his meditation.  ’And right, thou! more largely right!’ he thought, further advanced in it, of the great Giuseppe, the Genoese.  ’And right am I too, between that metal-rail of a politician and the deep dreamer, each of them incomplete for want of an element of the other!’ Practically and in vision right was Alvan, for those two opposites met fusing in him:  like the former, he counted on the supremacy of might; like the latter, he distinguished where it lay in perpetuity.

During his younger years he had been like neither in the moral curb they could put on themselves—­particularly the southern-blooded man.  He had resembled the naturally impatient northerner most, though not so supple for business as he.  But now he possessed the calmness of the Genoese; he had strong self-command now; he had the principle that life is too short for the indulgence of public fretfulness or of private quarrels; too valuable for fruitless risks; too sacred, one may say, for the shedding of blood on personal grounds.  Oh! he had himself well under, fear not.

He could give and take from opposition.  And rightly so, seeing that he confessed to his own bent for sarcastically stinging:  he was therefore bound to endure a retort.  Speech for speech, pamphlet for pamphlet, he could be temperate.  Nay, he defied an adversary to produce in him the sensation of intemperateness; so there would not be much danger of his being excited to betray it.  Shadowily he thought of the hard words hurled at him by the Rudigers, and of the injury Clotilde’s father did him by plotting to rob him of his daughter.  But how had an Alvan replied?—­with the arts of peaceful fence victoriously.  He conceived of no temptation to his repressed irascibility save the political.  A day might come for him and the vehement old Ironer to try their mettle in a tussle.  On that day he would have to be wary, but, as Alvan felt assured, he would be more master of himself than his antagonist.  He was for the young world, in the brain of a new order of things; the other based his unbending system on the visions of a feudal chief, and would win a great step perchance, but there he would stop:  he was not with the future!

This immediate prospect of a return to serenity after his recent charioteering, had set him thinking of himself and his days to come, which hung before him in a golden haze that was tranquillizing.  He had a name, he had a station:  he wanted power and he saw it approaching.