‘A refraction of the rays according to the altitude of the orb,’ observed the baroness in a tone of assent, and she smiled to herself at the condition of the man who could accept it for that.

He did not protest beyond presently a transient frown as at a bad taste on his tongue, and a rather petulant objection to her use of analogies, which he called the sapping of language.  She forbore to remind him in retort of his employment of metaphor when the figure served his purpose.

‘Marvellously,’ cried Alvan, ’marvellously that girl answered to my lead! and to-morrow—­you’ll own me right—­I must double the attraction.  I shall have to hand her back to her people for twenty-four hours, and the dose must be doubled to keep her fast and safe.  You see I read her flatly.  I read and am charitable.  I have a perfect philosophical tolerance.  I’m in the mood to-day of Horace hymning one of his fair Greeks.’

‘No, no that is a comparison past my endurance,’ interposed the baroness.  ’Friend Sigismund, you have no philosophy, you never had any; and the small crow and croon of Horace would be the last you could take up.  It is the chanted philosophy of comfortable stipendiaries, retired merchants, gouty patients on a restricted allowance of the grape, old men who have given over thinking, and young men who never had feeling—­the philosophy of swine grunting their carmen as they turn to fat in the sun.  Horace avaunt!  You have too much poetry in you to quote that unsanguine sensualist for your case.  His love distressed his liver, and gave him a jaundice once or twice, but where his love yields its poor ghost to his philosophy, yours begins its labours.  That everlasting Horace!  He is the versifier of the cushioned enemy, not of us who march along flinty ways:  the piper of the bourgeois in soul, poet of the conforming unbelievers!’

‘Pyrrha, Lydia, Lalage, Chloe, Glycera,’ Alvan murmured, amorous of the musical names.  ’Clotilde is a Greek of one of the Isles, an Ionian.  I see her in the Horatian ode as in one of those old round shield-mirrors which give you a speck of the figure on a silver-solar beam, brilliant, not much bigger than a dewdrop.  And so should a man’s heart reflect her!  Take her on the light in it, she is perfection.  We won’t take her in the shady part or on your flat looking-glasses.  There never was necessity for accuracy of line in the portraiture of women.  The idea of them is all we want:  it’s the best of them.  You will own she’s Greek; she’s a Perinthian, Andrian, Olythian, Saurian, Messenian.  One of those delicious girls in the New Comedy, I remember, was called the postponer, the deferrer, or, as we might say, the to-MORROWER.  There you have Clotilde:  she’s a to-MORROWER.  You climb the peak of to-morrow, and to see her at all you must see her on the next peak:  but she leaves you her promise to hug on every yesterday, and that keeps you going.  Ay, so we have patience!  Feeding on a young woman’s promises of yesterday in one’s fortieth year!—­it must end to-morrow, though I kill something.’