med, and it
was exercised in wildness of dialogue rather than in capricious
behaviour. If her flowing tongue was imperfectly controlled, it was
because she discoursed by preference to men upon our various affairs and
tangles, and they encouraged her with the tickled wonder which bids the
bold advance yet farther into bogland. Becoming the renowned original of
her society, wherever it might be, in Germany, Italy, Southern France,
she grew chillily sensible of the solitude decreed for their heritage to
our loftiest souls. Her Indian Bacchus, as a learned professor supplied
Prince Marko's title for her, was a pet, not a companion. She to him was
what she sought for in another. As much as she pitied herself for not
lighting on the predestined man, she pitied him for having met the woman,
so that her tenderness for both inspired many signs of warm affection,
not very unlike the thing it moaned secretly the not being. For she could
not but distinguish a more poignant sorrow in the seeing of the object we
yearn to vainly than in vainly yearning to one unseen. Dressed, to
delight him, in Prince Marko's colours, the care she bestowed on her
dressing was for the one absent, the shrouded comer: so she pleased the
prince to be pleasing to her soul's lord, and this, owing to an
appearance of satisfactory deception that it bore, led to her thinking
guiltily. We may ask it: an eagle is expected, and how is he to declare
his eagleship save by breaking through our mean conventional systems,
tearing links asunder, taking his own in the teeth of vulgar ordinances?
Clotilde's imagination drew on her reading for the knots it tied and
untied, and its ideas of grandeur. Her reading was an interfusion of
philosophy skimmed, and realistic romances deep-sounded. She tried hard,
but could get no other terrible tangle for her hero's exhibition of
flaming azure divineness than the vile one of the wedded woman. Further
thinking of it, she revived and recovered; she despised the complication,
yet without perceiving how else he was to manifest himself legitimately
in a dull modern world. The rescuing her from death would be a poor
imitation of worn-out heroes. His publication of a trumpeting book fell
appallingly flat in her survey. Deeds of gallantry done as an officer in
war (defending his country too) distinguished the soldier, but failed to
add the eagle feather to the man. She had a mind of considerable soaring
scope, and eclectic: it analyzed a Na