st you ought to know me. You know that if
I were to exercise my will firmly now--it would not waver if I called it
forth--I could carry you off and spare you the flutter you will have to
go through during our interlude with papa and mama.'

'I almost wish you would,' said she. She looked half imploringly, biting
her lip to correct the peeping wish.

Alvan pressed a finger on one of her dimples: 'Be brave. Flight and
defiance are our last resource. Now that I see you resolved I shun the
scandal, and we will leave it to them to insist on it, if it must be.
How can you be less than resolved after I have poured my influence into
your veins? The other day on the heights--had you consented then? Well!
it would have been very well, but not so well. We two have a future,
and are bound to make the opening chapters good sober reading, for
an example, if we can. I take you from your father's house, from your
mother's arms, from the "God speed" of your friends. That is how Alvan's
wife should be presented to the world.'

Clotilde's epistle to the baroness was composed, approved, and
despatched. To a frigid eye it read as more hypocritical than it really
was; for supposing it had to be written, the language of the natural
impulse called up to write it was necessarily in request, and that
language is easily overdone, so as to be discordant with the situation,
while it is, as the writer feels, a fairly true and well-formed
expression of the pretty impulse. But wiser is it always that the star
in the ascendant should not address the one waning. Hardly can a word
be uttered without grossly wounding. She would not do it to a younger
rival: the letter strikes on the recipient's age! She babbles of a
friendship: she plays at childish ninny! The display of her ingenuous
happiness causes feminine nature's bosom to rise in surges. The
declarations of her devotedness to the man waken comparisons with a
deeper, a longer-tried suffering. Actually the letter of the rising star
assumes personal feeling to have died out of the abandoned luminary, and
personal feeling is chafed to its acutest edge by the perusal; contempt
also of one who can stupidly simulate such innocence, is roused.

Among Alvan's gifts the understanding of women did not rank high. He
was too robust, he had been too successful. Your very successful hero
regards them as nine-pins destined to fall, the whole tuneful nine, at
a peculiar poetical twist of the bowler's wrist, one k