She wept over Alvan for having had so false a friend.

There remained no one that could be expected to intervene with a strong arm save the baroness.  The professor’s emphasized approval of her resolve to consult the wishes of her family was a shocking hypocrisy, and Clotilde thought of the contrast to it in her letter to the baroness.  The tripping and stumbling, prettily awkward little tone of gosling innocent new from its egg, throughout the letter, was a triumph of candour.  She repeated passages, paragraphs, of the letter, assuring herself that such affectionately reverential prattle would have moved her, and with the strongest desire to cast her arms about the writer:  it had been composed to be moving to a woman, to any woman.  The old woman was entreated to bestow her blessing on the young one, all in Arcadia, and let the young one nestle to the bosom she had not an idea of robbing.  She could not have had the idea, else how could she have made the petition?  And in order to compliment a venerable dame on her pure friendship for a gentleman, it was imperative to reject the idea.  Besides, after seeing the photograph of the baroness, common civility insisted on the purity of her friendship.  Nay, in mercy to the poor gentleman, friendship it must be.

A letter of reply from that noble lady was due.  Possibly she had determined not to write, but to act.  She was a lady of exalted birth, a lady of the upper aristocracy, who could, if she would, bring both a social and official pressure upon the General:  and it might be in motion now behind the scenes, Clotilde laid hold of her phantom baroness, almost happy under the phantom’s whisper that she need not despair.  ’You have been a little weak,’ the phantom said to her, and she acquiesced with a soft sniffle, adding:  ’But, dearest, honoured lady, you are a woman, and know what our trials are when we are so persecuted.  O that I had your beautiful sedateness!  I do admire it, madam.  I wish I could imitate.’  She carried her dramatic ingenuousness farthel still by saying:  ’I have seen your photograph’; implying that the inimitable, the much coveted air of composure breathed out of yonder presentment of her features.  ’For I can’t call you good looking,’ she said within herself, for the satisfaction of her sense of candour, of her sense of contrast as well.  And shutting her eyes, she thought of the horrid penitent a harsh-faced woman in confession must be: 

The picture sent her swimmingly to the confessional, where sat a man with his head in a hood, and he soon heard enough of mixed substance to dash his hood, almost his head, off.  Beauty may be immoderately frank in soul to the ghostly.  The black page comprised a very long list.  ’But put this on the white page,’ says she to the surging father inside his box—­’I loved Alvan!’ A sentence or two more fetches the Alvanic man jumping out of the priest:  and so closely does she realize it that she has to hunt herself into a corner with the question, whether she shall tell him she guessed him to be no other than her lover.  ’How could you expect a girl, who is not a Papist, to come kneeling here?’ she says.  And he answers with no matter what of a gallant kind.