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 Napoleon,
and declined the position of his empress. The man must be a gentleman.
Poets, princes, warriors, potentates, marched before her speculative
fancy unselected.

So far, as far as she can be portrayed introductorily, she is not
without exemplars in the sex. Young women have been known to turn
from us altogether, never to turn back, so poor and shrunken, or so
fleshly-bulgy have we all appeared in the fairy jacket they wove for the
right one of us to wear becomingly. But the busy great world was round
Clotilde while she was malleable, though she might be losing her
fresh ideas of the hammer and the block, and that is a wo