ofessor would not be deceived, and a lover with a heart to reach to
her and read her could never be hoodwinked by so palpable a piece
of slavishness. She was indeed slavish; the apology necessitated the
confession. But that promise of courage, coming of her ownership of
sense, vindicated her prospectively; she had so little of it that she
embraced it as a present possession, and she made it Alvan's task to
put it to the trial. Hence it became Alvan's offence if, owing to
his absence, she could be charged with behaving badly. Her generosity
pardoned him his inexplicable delay to appear in his might: 'But see
what your continued delay causes!' she said, and her tone was merely
sorrowful.

She had forgotten her signature to the letter to the professor when
his answer arrived. The sight of the handwriting of one of her lover's
faithfullest friends was like a peal of bells to her, and she tore the
letter open, and began to blink and spell at a strange language,
taking the frosty sentences piecemeal. He begged her to be firm in
her resolution, give up Alvan and obey her parents! This man of high
intelligence and cultivation wrote like a provincial schoolmistress
moralizing. Though he knew the depth of her passion for Alvan, and
had within the month received her lark-song of her betrothal, he, this
man--if living man he could be thought--counselled her to endeavour to
deserve the love and respect of her parents, alluded to Alvan's age
and her better birth, approved her resolve to consult the wishes of
her family, and in fine was as rank a traitor to friendship as any
chronicled. Out on him! She swept him from earth.

And she had built some of her hopes on the professor. 'False friend!'
she cried.

She wept over Alvan for having had so false a friend.

There remained no one that could be expected to intervene with a strong
arm save the baroness. The professor's emphasized approval of her
resolve to consult the wishes of her family was a shocking hypocrisy,
and Clotilde thought of the contrast to it in her letter to the
baroness. The tripping and stumbling, prettily awkward little tone of
gosling innocent new from its egg, throughout the letter, was a triumph
of candour. She repeated passages, paragraphs, of the letter, assuring
herself that such affectionately reverential prattle would have moved
her, and with the strongest desire to cast her arms about the writer: it
had been composed to be moving to a woman, to any woman.