r, rejoin: 'Come, come, let us be honest. That is
all very well for the little midges floating round us to say of Alvan,
but we two can clasp hands and avow proudly that we both know and love
the man.'

'Were it true, I would own it at once, but I repeat, that he is a
total stranger to me,' she said, seeing the Jew under quite a different
illumination.

'Actually?'

'In honour.'

'You have never met, never seen him, never read any of his writings?'

'Never. I have heard his name, that is all.'

'Then,' the officer's voice was earnest, 'I pity him, and you no less,
while you remain strangers, for you were made for one another. Those
ideas you have expressed, nay, the very words, are Alvan's: I have heard
him use them. He has just the same original views of society and history
as yours; they're identical; your features are not unlike... you talk
alike: I could fancy your voice the sister of his. You look incredulous?
You were speaking of Pompeius, and you said "Plutarch's Pompeius," and
more for it is almost incredible under the supposition that you do not
know and have never listened to Alvan--you said that Pompeius appeared
to have been decorated with all the gifts of the Gods to make the
greater sacrifice of him to Caesar, who was not personally worth a
pretty woman's "bite." Come, now--you must believe me: at a supper
at Alvan's table the other night, the talk happened to be of a
modern Caesar, which led to the real one, and from him to "Plutarch's
Pompeius," as Alvan called him; and then he said of him what you have
just said, absolutely the same down to the allusion to the bite. I
assure you. And you have numbers of little phrases in common: you are
partners in aphorisms: Barriers are for those who cannot fly: that is
Alvan's. I could multiply them if I could remember; they struck me as
you spoke.'

'I must be a shameless plagiarist,' said Clotilde.

'Or he,' said Count Kollin.

It is here the place of the Chorus to state that these: ideas were in
the air at the time; sparks of the Vulcanic smithy at work in politics
and pervading literature: which both Alvan and Clotilde might catch
and give out as their own, in the honest belief that the epigram was,
original to them. They were not members of a country where literature is
confined to its little paddock, without, influence on the larger field
(part lawn, part marsh) of the social world: they were readers in
sympathetic action with thinkers and literary