Clotilde rocked in an agony.  Her friend was troubled.  Both ladies knew what there would be to encounter better than he.  But the man, strong in his belief in himself, imposed his will on them.

Alvan and Clotilde clasped hands as they went downstairs to Madame Emerly’s reception room.  She could hardly speak:  ‘Do not forsake me.’

‘Is this forsaking?’ He could ask it in the deeply questioning tone which supplies the answer.

‘Oh, Alvan!’ She would have said:  ‘Be warned.’

He kissed her fingers.  ‘Trust to me.’

She had to wrap her shivering spirit in a blind reliance and utter leaning on him.

She could almost have said:  ‘Know me better’; and she would, sincere as her passion in its shallow vessel was, have been moved to say it for a warning while yet there was time to leave the house instead of turning into that room, had not a remainder of her first exaltation (rapidly degenerating to desperation) inspired her with the thought of her being a part of this handsome, undaunted, triumph-flashing man.

Such a state of blind reliance and utter leaning, however, has a certain tendency to disintegrate the will, and by so doing it prepares the spirit to be a melting prize of the winner.

Men and women alike, who renounce their own individuality by cowering thus abjectly under some other before the storm, are in reality abjuring their idea of that other, and offering themselves up to the genius of Power in whatsoever direction it may chance to be manifested, in whatsoever person.  We no sooner shut our eyes than we consent to be prey, we lose the soul of election.

Mark her as she proceeds.  For should her hero fail, and she be suffering through his failure and her reliance on him, the blindness of it will seem to her to have been an infinite virtue, anything but her deplorable weakness crouching beneath his show of superhuman strength.  And it will seem to her, so long as her sufferings endure, that he deceived her just expectations, and was a vain pretender to the superhuman:—­for it was only a superhuman Jew and democrat whom she could have thought of espousing.  The pusillanimous are under a necessity to be self-consoled when they are not self-justified:  it is their instinctive manner of putting themselves in the right to themselves.  The love she bore him, because it was the love his high conceit exacted, hung on success she was ready to fly with him and love him faithfully but not without some reason (where reason, we will own, should not quite so coldly obtrude) will it seem to her, that the man who would not fly, and would try the conflict, insisted to stake her love on the issue he provoked.  He roused the tempest, he angered the Fates, he tossed her to them; and reason, coldest reason, close as it ever is to the craven’s heart in its hour of trial, whispers that he was prompted to fling the gambler’s die by the swollen conceit in his fortune rather than by his desire for the prize.