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.'

Kill, he meant, the aerial wild spirit he could admire as her character,
when he had the prospect of extinguishing it in his grasp.

'What do you meditate killing?' said the baroness.

'The fool of the years behind me,' he replied, 'and entering on my
forty-first a sage.'

'To be the mate and equal of your companion?'

'To prove I have had good training under the wisest to act as her guide
and master.'

'If she--' the baroness checked her exclamation, saying: 'She declined to
come to me. I would have plumbed her for some solid ground, something to
rest one's faith on. Your Pyrrhas, Glyceras, and others of the like, were
not