urries over the
forms of a brial to sign the execution-warrant that makes it feel like
justice. You will see. She cannot forgive me for not pretending to enter
into her enthusiasm. She will make him believe I conspired against her.
Men in love are children with their mistresses--the greatest of them;
their heads are under the woman's feet. What have I not done to aid him!
At his instance, I went to the archbishop, to implore one of the princes
of the Church for succour. I knelt to an ecclesiastic. I did a ludicrous
and a shameful thing, knowing it in advance to be a barren farce. I
obeyed his wish. The tale will be laughable. I obeyed him. I would
not have it on my conscience that the commission of any deed ennomic,
however unwonted, was refused by me to serve Alvan. You are my witness,
Tresten, that for a young woman of common honesty I was ready to pack
and march. Qualities of mind-mind! They were out of the question. He had
a taste for a wife. If he had hit on a girl commonly honest, she might
not have harmed him--the contrary; cut his talons. What is this girl?
Exactly what one might be sure his appreciation, in woman-flesh, would
lead him to fix on; a daughter of the Philistines, naturally, and
precisely the one of all on earth likely to confound him after marriage
as she has played fast and loose with him before it. He has never
understood women--cannot read them. Could a girl like that keep a
secret? She's a Cressida--a creature of every camp! Not an idea of the
cause he is vowed to! not a sentiment in harmony with it! She is viler
than any of those Berlin light o' loves on the eve of Jena. Stable as a
Viennese dancing slut home from Mariazell! This is the girl-transparent
to the whole world! But his heart is on her, and he must have her,
I suppose; and I shall have to bear her impertinences, or sign my
demission and cease to labour for the cause at least in conjunction
with Alvan. And how other wise? He is the life of it, and I am doomed to
uselessness.'

Tresten nodded a protesting assent.

'Not quite so bad,' he said, with the encouraging smile which could
persuade a friend to put away bilious visions. 'Of the two, if you two
are divisible, we could better dispense with him. She'll slip him, she's
an eel. I have seen eels twine on a prong of the fork that prods them;
but she's an actress, a slippery one through and through, with no real
embrace in her, not even a common muscular contraction. Of every camp!
a