They were interrupted between-whiles by weariful men running to Alvan for counsel on various matters—­how to play their game, or the exact phrasing of some pregnant sentence current in politics or literature.  He satisfied them severally and shouldered them away, begging for peace that night.  Clotilde corroborated his accurate recital of the lines of a contested verse of the incomparable Heinrich, and they fell to capping verses of the poet-lucid metheglin, with here and there no dubious flavour of acid, and a lively sting in the tail of the honey.  Sentiment, cynicism, and satin impropriety and scabrous, are among those verses, where pure poetry has a recognized voice; but the lower elements constitute the popularity in a cultivated society inclining to wantonness out of bravado as well as by taste.  Alvan, looking indolently royal and royally roguish, quoted a verse that speaks of the superfluousness of a faithless lady’s vowing bite: 

       ’The kisses were in the course of things,
        The bite was a needless addition.’

Clotilde could not repress her reddening—­Count Kollin had repeated too much!  She dropped her eyes, with a face of sculpture, then resumed their chatter.  He spared her the allusion to Pompeius.  She convinced him of her capacity for reserve besides intrepidity, and flattered him too with her blush.  She could dare to say to Kollin what her scarlet sensibility forbade her touching on with him:  not that she would not have had an airy latitude with him to touch on what she pleased:  he liked her for her boldness and the cold peeping of the senses displayed in it:  he liked also the distinction she made.

The cry to supper conduced to a further insight of her adaptation to his requirements in a wife.  They marched to the table together, and sat together, and drank a noble Rhine wine together—­true Rauenthal.  His robustness of body and soul inspired the wish that his well-born wife might be, in her dainty fashion, yet honestly and without mincing, his possible boonfellow:  he and she, glass in hand, thanking the bountiful heavens, blessing mankind in chorus.  It belonged to his hearty dream of the wife he would choose, were she to be had.  The position of interpreter of heaven’s benevolence to mankind through his own enjoyment of the gifts, was one that he sagaciously demanded for himself, sharing it with the Philistine unknowingly; and to have a wife no less wise than he on this throne of existence was a rosy exaltation.  Clotilde kindled to the hint of his festival mood of Solomon at the banquet.  She was not devoid of a discernment of flavours; she had heard grave judges at her father’s board profoundly deliver their verdicts upon this and that vineyard and vintage; and it is a note of patriotism in her country to be enthusiastic for wine of the Rhine:  she was, moreover, thirsty from much talking and excitement.  She drank her glass relishingly, declaring the wine princely.  Alvan smacked his hands in a rapture:  ’You are not for the extract of raisin our people have taken to copy from French Sauternes, to suit a female predilection for sugar?’