mmand now; he had the principle that life is too short
for the indulgence of public fretfulness or of private quarrels; too
valuable for fruitless risks; too sacred, one may say, for the shedding
of blood on personal grounds. Oh! he had himself well under, fear not.

He could give and take from opposition. And rightly so, seeing that he
confessed to his own bent for sarcastically stinging: he was therefore
bound to endure a retort. Speech for speech, pamphlet for pamphlet, he
could be temperate. Nay, he defied an adversary to produce in him the
sensation of intemperateness; so there would not be much danger of
his being excited to betray it. Shadowily he thought of the hard words
hurled at him by the Rudigers, and of the injury Clotilde's father
did him by plotting to rob him of his daughter. But how had an Alvan
replied?--with the arts of peaceful fence victoriously. He conceived of
no temptation to his repressed irascibility save the political. A day
might come for him and the vehement old Ironer to try their mettle in
a tussle. On that day he would have to be wary, but, as Alvan felt
assured, he would be more master of himself than his antagonist. He was
for the young world, in the brain of a new order of things; the other
based his unbending system on the visions of a feudal chief, and would
win a great step perchance, but there he would stop: he was not with the
future!

This immediate prospect of a return to serenity after his recent
charioteering, had set him thinking of himself and his days to come,
which hung before him in a golden haze that was tranquillizing. He had a
name, he had a station: he wanted power and he saw it approaching.

He wanted a wife too. Colonel von Tresten took coffee with him previous
to the start with Dr. Storchel to General von Rudiger's house. Alvan
consequently was unable any longer to think of a wife in the abstract.
He wanted Clotilde. Here was a man going straight to her, going to see
her, positively to see her and hear her voice!--almost instantly to hear
her voice, and see her eyes and hair, touch her hand. Oh! and rally her,
rouse her wit; and be able to tell him the flower she wore for the day,
and where she wore it--at her temples, or sliding to the back hair, or
in her bosom, or at her waist! She had innumerable tricks of indication
in these shifty pretty ways of hers, and was full of varying speech to
the cunning reader of her.

'But keep her to seriousness,' Alvan said.