‘They are not joined yet,’ said the colonel.

’She has him by the worst half of him.  Her correspondence with me—­her letter to excuse her insolence, which she does like a prim chit—­throws a light on the girl she is.  She will set him aiming at power to trick her out in the decorations.  She will not keep him to his labours to consolidate the power.  She will pervert the aesthetic in him, through her hold on his material nature, his vanity, his luxuriousness.  She is one of the young women who begin timidly, and when they see that they enjoy comparative impunity, grow intrepid in dissipation, and that palling, they are ravenously ambitious.  She will drive him at his mark before the time is ripe—­ruin-him.  He is a Titan, not a god, though god-like he seems in comparison with men.  He would be fleshly enough in any hands.  This girl will drain him of all his nobler fire.’

‘She shows mighty little of the inclination,’ said the colonel.

‘To you.  But when they come together?  I know his voice!’

The colonel protested his doubts of their coming together.

‘Ultimately?’ the baroness asked, and brooded.  ’But she will have to see him; and then will she resist him?  I shall change one view of her if she does.’

‘She will shirk the interview,’ Tresten remarked.  ’Supposing they meet:  I don’t think much will come of it, unless they meet on a field, and he has an hour’s grace to catch her up and be off with her.  She’s as calm as the face of a clock, and wags her Yes and No about him just as unconcernedly as a clock’s pendulum.  I’ve spoken to many a sentinel outpost who wasn’t deader on the subject in monosyllables than mademoiselle.  She has a military erectness, and answers you and looks you straight at the eyes, perfectly unabashed by your seeing “the girl she is,” as you say.  She looked at me downright defying me to despise her.  Alvan has been tricked by her colour:  she’s icy.  She has no passion.  She acts up to him when they’re together, and that deceives him.  I doubt her having blood—­there’s no heat in it, if she has.’

‘And he cajoled Count Hollinger to send an envoy to see him righted!’ the baroness ejaculated.  ’Hollinger is not a sentimental person, I assure you, and not likely to have taken a step apparently hostile to the Rudigers, if he had not been extraordinarily shaken by Alvan.  What character of man is this Dr. Storchel?’

Tresten described Count Hollinger’s envoy, so quaintly deputed to act the part of legal umpire in a family business, as a mild man of law with no ideas or interests outside the law; spectacled, nervous, formal, a stranger to the passions; and the baroness was amused to hear of Storchel and Alvan’s placid talk together upon themes of law, succeeded by the little advocate’s bewildered fright at one of Alvan’s gentler explosions.  Tresten sketched it.  The baroness realized it, and shut her lips tight for a laugh of essential humour.