good manners and right feeling forbid her to refuse.  She is an exceedingly intelligent girl, and I half fear I have helped you to a wrong impression of her.  You will really appreciate her wit; you will indeed; believe me, you will.  We pardon nonsense in a girl.  Married, she will put on the matron with becoming decency, and I am responsible for her then; I stand surety for her then; when I have her with me I warrant her mine and all mine, head and heels, at a whistle, like the Cossack’s horse.  I fancy that at forty I am about as young as most young men.  I promise her another forty manful working years.  Are you dubious of that?’

‘I nod to you from the palsied summit of ninety,’ said the baroness.

Alvan gave a short laugh and stammered excuses for his naked egoism, comparing himself to a forester who has sharpened such an appetite in toiling to slay his roe that he can think of nothing but the fire preparing the feast.

‘Hymen and things hymenaeal!’ he said, laughing at himself for resuming the offence on the apology for it.  ’I could talk with interest of a trousseau.  I have debated in my mind with parliamentary acrimony about a choice of wedding-presents.  As she is legally free to bestow her hand on me—­and only a brute’s horns could contest the fact—­she may decide to be married the day after to-morrow, and get the trousseau in Paris.  She has a turn for startling.  I can imagine that if I proposed a run for it she would be readier to spring to be on the road with me than in acquiescing in a quiet arrangement about a ceremonial day; partly because, in the first case, she would throw herself and the rest of the adventure on me, at no other cost than the enjoyment of one of her impulses; and in the second, because she is a girl who would require a full band of the best Berlin orchestra in perpetual play to keep up her spirits among her people during the preparations for espousing a democrat, demagogue, and Jew, of a presumed inferior station by birth to her own.  Give Momus a sister, Clotilde is the lady!  I know her.  I would undertake to put a spell on her and keep her contented on a frontier—­not Russian, any barbarous frontier where there is a sun.  She must have sun.  One might wrap her in sables, but sun is best.  She loves it best, though she looks remarkably well in sables.  Never shall I forget . . . she is frileuse, and shivers into them!  There are Frenchmen who could paint it—­only Frenchmen.  Our artists, no.  She is very French.  Born in France she would have been a matchless Parisienne.  Oh! she’s a riddle of course.  I don’t pretend to spell every letter of her.  The returning of my presents is odd.  No, I maintain that she is a coward acting under domination, and there’s no other way of explaining the puzzle.  I was out of sight, they bullied her, and she yielded—­bewilderingly, past comprehension it seems—­cat!—­until you remember what she’s made of:  she’s a reed.  Now I reappear armed with powers to give