rld of much
solicitation to induce a vivid girl to merge an ideal in a living image.
Supposing, when she has accomplished it, that men justify her choice,
the living will retain the colours of the ideal. We have it on record
that he may seem an eagle.

'You talk curiously like Alvan, do you know,' a gentleman of her country
said to her as they were descending the rock of Capri, one day. He said
it musingly.

He belonged to a circle beneath her own: the learned and artistic.
She had not heard of this Alvan, or had forgotten him; but professing
universal knowledge, especially of celebrities, besides having an
envious eye for that particular circle, which can pretend to be the
choicest of all, she was unwilling to betray her ignorance, and she
dimpled her cheek, as one who had often heard the thing said to her
before. She smiled musingly.

CHAPTER II

'Who is the man they call Alvan?' She put the question at the first
opportunity to an aunt of hers.

Up went five-fingered hands. This violent natural sign of horror was
comforting: she saw that he was a celebrity indeed.

'Alvan! My dear Clotilde! What on earth can you want to know about a
creature who is the worst of demagogues, a disreputable person, and a
Jew!'

Clotilde remarked that she had asked only who he was. 'Is he clever?'

'He is one of the basest of those wretches who are for upsetting the
Throne and Society to gratify their own wicked passions: that is what he
is.'

'But is he clever?'

'Able as Satan himself, they say. He is a really dangerous, bad man. You
could not have been curious about a worse one.'

'Politically, you mean.'

'Of course I do.'

The lady had not thought of any other kind of danger from a man of that
station.

The likening of one to Satan does not always exclude meditation upon
him. Clotilde was anxious to learn in what way her talk resembled
Alvan's. He being that furious creature, she thought of herself at her
wildest, which was in her estimation her best; and consequently, she
being by no means a furious creature, though very original, she could
not meditate on him without softening the outlines given him by report;
all because of the likeness between them; and, therefore, as she had
knowingly been taken for furious by very foolish people, she settled
it that Alvan was also a victim of the prejudices he scorned. It had
pleased her at times to scorn our prejudices and feel the tremendous
weight she brought on he