‘Consider!’ Clotilde flutteringly entreated him.

’The world? you dear heaven of me!  Looking down on me does not compromise you, and I am not ashamed of my devotions.  I sat in gloom:  you came:  I saw my goddess and worshipped.  The world, Lutece, the world is a variable monster; it rends the weak whether sincere or false; but those who weld strength with sincerity may practise their rites of religion publicly, and it fawns to them, and bellows to imitate.  Nay, I say that strength in love is the sole sincerity, and the world knows it, muffs it in the air about us, and so we two are privileged.  Politically also we know that strength is the one reality:  the rest is shadow.  Behind the veil of our human conventions power is constant as ever, and to perceive the fact is to have the divining rod-to walk clear of shams.  He is the teacher who shows where power exists:  he is the leader who wakens and forms it.  Why have I unfailingly succeeded?—­I never doubted!  The world voluntarily opens a path to those who step determinedly.  You—­to your honour?—­I won’t decide—­but you have the longest in my experience resisted.  I have a Durandal to hew the mountain walls; I have a voice for ears, a net for butterflies, a hook for fish, and desperation to plunge into marshes:  but the feu follet will not be caught.  One must wait—­wait till her desire to have a soul bids her come to us.  She has come!  A soul is hers:  and see how, instantly, the old monster, the world, which has no soul—­not yet:  we are helping it to get one—­becomes a shadow, powerless to stop or overawe.  For I do give you a soul, think as you will of it.  I give you strength to realize, courage to act.  It is the soul that does things in this life—­the rest is vapour.  How do we distinguish love?—­as we do music by the pure note won from resolute strings.  The tense chord is music, and it is love.  This higher and higher mountain air, with you beside me, sweeps me like a harp.’

‘Oh! talk on, talk on! talk ever! do not cease talking to me!’ exclaimed Clotilde.

‘You feel the mountain spirit?’

‘I feel that you reveal it.’

‘Tell me the books you have been reading.’

‘Oh, light literature-poor stuff.’

’When we two read together you will not say that.  Light literature is the garden and the orchard, the fountain, the rainbow, the far view; the view within us as well as without.  Our blood runs through it, our history in the quick.  The Philistine detests it, because he has no view, out or in.  The dry confess they are cut off from the living tree, peeled and sapless, when they condemn it.  The vulgar demand to have their pleasures in their own likeness—­and let them swamp their troughs! they shall not degrade the fame of noble fiction.  We are the choice public, which will have good writing for light reading.  Poet, novelist, essayist, dramatist, shall be ranked honourable in my Republic.  I am neither, but a man of law,