ned; a world where
ideas were current and speech was wine. The prince nodded; if she had
these opinions, it must be good for him to have them too, and he shared
them, as it were, by the touch of her hand, and for the length of time
that he touched her hand, as an electrical shock may be taken by one far
removed from the battery, susceptible to it only through the link; he was
capable of thinking all that came to him from her a blessing--shocks,
wounds and disruptions. He did not add largely to her stock of items, nor
did he fetch new colours. The telegraph wire was his model of style. He
was more or less a serviceless Indian Bacchus, standing for sign of the
beauty and vacuity of their world: and how dismally narrow that world
was, she felt with renewed astonishment at every dive out of her
gold-fish pool into the world of tides below; so that she was ready to
scorn the cultivation of the graces, and had, when not submitting to the
smell, fanciful fits of a liking for tobacco smoke--the familiar incense
of those homes where speech was wine.

At last she fell to the asking of herself whether, in the same city with
him, often among his friends, hearing his latest intimate remarks--things
homely redolent of him as hot bread of the oven--she was ever to meet
this man upon whom her thoughts were bent to the eclipse of all others.
She desired to meet him for comparison's sake, and to criticize a popular
hero. It was inconceivable that any one popular could approach her
standard, but she was curious; flame played about him; she had some
expectation of easing a spiteful sentiment created by the recent
subjection of her thoughts to the prodigious little Jew; and some feeling
of closer pity for Prince Marko she had, which urged her to be rid of her
delusion as to the existence of a wonder-working man on our earth, that
she might be sympathetically kind to the prince, perhaps compliant, and
so please her parents, be good and dull, and please everybody, and adieu
to dreams, good night, and so to sleep with the beasts! . . .

Calling one afternoon on a new acquaintance of the flat table-land she
liked tripping down to from her heights, Clotilde found the lady in
supreme toilette, glowing, bubbling: 'Such a breakfast, my dear!' The
costly profusion, the anecdotes, the wit, the fun, the copious draughts
of the choicest of life--was there ever anything to match it? Never in
that lady's recollection, or her husband's either, she exclaim