traight; but of course if you agitate the compass
the needle's all in a tremble: and the vessel is weak, I admit, but the
instinct's positive. To doubt it would upset my understanding. I have
had three distinct experiences of my influence over her, and each time,
curiously each time exactly in proportion to my degree of resolve--but,
baroness, I tell you it was minutely in proportion to it; weighed down
to the grain!--each time did that girl respond to me with a similar
degree of earnestness. As I waned, she waned; as I heated, so did she,
and from spark-heat to flame and to furnace-heat!'

'A refraction of the rays according to the altitude of the orb,'
observed the baroness in a tone of assent, and she smiled to herself at
the condition of the man who could accept it for that.

He did not protest beyond presently a transient frown as at a bad taste
on his tongue, and a rather petulant objection to her use of analogies,
which he called the sapping of language. She forbore to remind him in
retort of his employment of metaphor when the figure served his purpose.

'Marvellously,' cried Alvan, 'marvellously that girl answered to my
lead! and to-morrow--you'll own me right--I must double the attraction.
I shall have to hand her back to her people for twenty-four hours, and
the dose must be doubled to keep her fast and safe. You see I read
her flatly. I read and am charitable. I have a perfect philosophical
tolerance. I'm in the mood to-day of Horace hymning one of his fair
Greeks.'

'No, no that is a comparison past my endurance,' interposed the
baroness. 'Friend Sigismund, you have no philosophy, you never had any;
and the small crow and croon of Horace would be the last you could take
up. It is the chanted philosophy of comfortable stipendiaries, retired
merchants, gouty patients on a restricted allowance of the grape,
old men who have given over thinking, and young men who never had
feeling--the philosophy of swine grunting their carmen as they turn to
fat in the sun. Horace avaunt! You have too much poetry in you to quote
that unsanguine sensualist for your case. His love distressed his liver,
and gave him a jaundice once or twice, but where his love yields its
poor ghost to his philosophy, yours begins its labours. That everlasting
Horace! He is the versifier of the cushioned enemy, not of us who march
along flinty ways: the piper of the bourgeois in soul, poet of the
conforming unbelievers!'

'Pyrrha, Lydia, Lala