’Then we missed:  now we meet.  It is a year lost.  A year is a great age!  Reflect on it and what you owe me.  How I wished for a comrade at Capri!  Not a “young lady,” and certainly no man.  The understanding Feminine, was my desire—­a different thing from the feminine understanding, usually.  I wanted my comrade young and fair, necessarily of your sex, but with heart and brain:  an insane request, I fancied, until I heard that you were the person I wanted.  In default of you I paraded the island with Tiberius, who is my favourite tyrant.  We took the initiative against the patricians, at my suggestion, and the Annals were written by a plebeian demagogue, instead of by one of that party, whose account of my extinction by command of the emperor was pathetic.  He apologized in turn for my imperial master and me, saying truly, that the misunderstanding between us was past cement:  for each of us loved the man but hated his office; and as the man is always more in his office than he is in himself, clearly it was the lesser portion of our friend that each of us loved.  So, I, as the weaker, had to perish, as he would have done had I been the stronger; I admitted it, and sent my emperor my respectful adieux, with directions for the avoiding of assassins.  Mademoiselle, by delaying your departure seven days you would have saved me from death.  You see, the official is the artificial man, and I ought to have known there is no natural man left in us to weigh against the artificial.  I counted on the emperor’s personal affection, forgetting that princes cannot be our friends.’

‘You died bravely?’

Clotilde entered into the extravagance with a happy simulation of zest.

’Simply, we will say.  My time had come, and I took no sturdy pose, but let the life-stream run its course for a less confined embankment.  Sapphire sea, sapphire sky:  one believes in life there, thrills with it, when life is ebbing:  ay, as warmly as when life is at the flow in our sick and shrivelled North—­the climate for dried fish!  Verily the second death of hearing that a gold-haired Lucretia had been on the island seven days earlier, was harder to bear.  Tell me frankly—­the music in Italy?’

‘Amorous and martial, brainless and monotonous.’

‘Excellent!’ his eyes flashed delightedly.  ’O comrade of comrades! that year lost to me will count heavily as I learn to value those I have gained.  Yes, brainless!  There, in music, we beat them, as politically France beats us.  No life without brain!  The brainless in Art and in Statecraft are nothing but a little more obstructive than the dead.  It is less easy to cut a way through them.  But it must be done, or the Philistine will be as the locust in his increase, and devour the green blades of the earth.  You have been trained to shudder at the demagogue?’

‘I do not shudder,’ said Clotilde.