He had quitted Tresten, and was talking to himself, cheating’ himself, not discordantly at all.  The poet of the company within him claimed the word and was allowed by the others to dilate on Clotilde’s likings, and the honeymoon or post-honeymoon amusements to be provided for her in Pyrenean valleys, and Parisian theatres and salons.  She was friande of chocolates, bon-bons:  she enjoyed fine pastry, had a real relish of good wine.  She should have the best of everything; he knew the spots of the very best that Paris could supply, in confiseurs and restaurants, and in millinery likewise.  A lively recollection of the prattle of Parisian ladies furnished names and addresses likely to prove invaluable to Clotilde.  He knew actors and actresses, and managers of theatres, and mighty men in letters.  She should have the cream of Paris.  Does she hint at rewarding him for his trouble?  The thought of her indebted lips, half closed, asking him how to repay him, sprang his heart to his throat.

CHAPTER XVI

Then he found himself saying:  ‘At the age I touch!’ . . .

At the age of forty, men that love love rootedly.  If the love is plucked from them, the life goes with it.

He backed on his physical pride, a stout bulwark.  His forty years—­the forty, the fifty, the sixty of Alvan, matched the twenties and thirties of other men.

Still it was true that he had reached an age when the desire to plant his affections in a dear fair bosom fixedly was natural.  Fairer, dearer than she was never one on earth!  He stood bareheaded for coolness, looking in the direction Tresten had taken, his forehead shining and eyes charged with the electrical activity of the mind, reading intensely all who passed him, without a thought upon any of these objects in their passage.  The people were read, penetrated, and flung off as from a whirring of wheels; to cut their place in memory sharp as in steel when imagination shall by and by renew the throbbing of that hour, if the wheels be not stilled.  The world created by the furnaces of vitality inside him absorbed his mind; and strangely, while receiving multitudinous vivid impressions, he did not commune with one, was unaware of them.  His thick black hair waved and glistened over the fine aquiline of his face.  His throat was open to the breeze.  His great breast and head were joined by a massive column of throat that gave volume for the coursing of the blood to fire the battery of thought, perchance in a tempest overflood it, extinguish it.  His fortieth year was written on his complexion and presence:  it was the fortieth of a giant growth that will bend at the past eightieth as little as the rock-pine, should there come no uprooting tempest.  It said manhood, and breathed of settled strength of muscle, nerve, and brain.