could see and confess the downright
impossibility of the marriage Alvan proposed. Tresten, her father said,
talked of his friend Alvan as wild and eccentric, but now
becoming convinced that such a family as hers could never tolerate
him--considering his age, his birth, his blood, his habits, his
politics, his private entanglements and moral reputation, it was partly
hinted.

She shuddered at this false Tresten. He and the professor might be
strung together for examples of perfidy! His reverence of the baroness
gave his cold blue eyes the iciness of her loathed letter. Alvan, she
remembered, used to exalt him among the gallantest of the warriors
dedicating their swords to freedom. The dedication of the sword, she
felt sure, was an accident: he was a man of blood. And naturally, she
must be hated by the man reverencing the baroness. If ever man had
executioner stamped on his face, it was he! Like the professor, nay,
like Alvan himself, he would not see that she was the victim of tyranny:
none of her signs would they see. They judged of her by her inanimate
frame in the hands of her torturers breaking her on the wheel. She
called to mind a fancy that she had looked at Tresten out of her
deadness earnestly for just one instant: more than an instant she could
not, beneath her father's vigilant watch and into those repellant cold
blue butcher eyes. Tresten might clearly have understood the fleeting
look. What were her words! what her deeds!

The look was the truth revealed-her soul. It begged for life like an
infant; and the man's face was an iron rock in reply! No wonder--he
worshipped the baroness! So great was Clotilde's hatred of him that it
overflooded the image of Alvan, who called him friend, and deputed him
to act as friend. Such blindness, weakness, folly, on the part of one of
Alvan's pretensions, incurred a shade of her contempt. She had not ever
thought of him coldly: hitherto it would have seemed a sacrilege; but
now she said definitely, the friend of Tresten cannot be the man I
supposed him! and she ascribed her capacity for saying it, and for
perceiving and adding up Alvan's faults of character, to the freezing
she had taken from that most antipathetic person. She confessed to
sensations of spite which would cause her to reject and spurn even his
pleadings for Alvan, if they were imaginable as actual. Their not being
imaginable allowed her to indulge her naughtiness harmlessly, for the
gratification of the id