m the rising demagogue of the time
dressed him in such terrors as to make him appear an impending Attila of
the voracious hordes which live from hand to mouth, without intervention
of a banker and property to cry truce to the wolf, he would have shone
under a different aspect enough to send them to the poets to solve
their perplexity, had the knowledge been subjoined that this terrific
devastator swinging the sanguinary stick was a slave of love, who staked
his all upon his love, loved up to his capacity desperately, loved a
girl, and hung upon her voice to hear whether his painful knocking at a
door should gain him admittance to the ranks of the orderly citizens
of the legitimately-satiated passions, or else--the voice of a girl
annihilate him.

He loved like the desert-bred Eastern, as though his blood had never
ceased to be steeped in its fountain Orient; loved barbarously, but with
a compelling resolve to control his blood and act and be the civilized
man, sober by virtue of his lady's gracious aid. In fact, it was the
civilized man in him that had originally sought the introduction to her,
with a bribe to the untameable. The former had once led, and hoped to
lead again. Alvan was a revolutionist in imagination, the workman's
friend in rational sympathy, their leader upon mathematical calculation,
but a lawyer, a reasoner in law, and therefore of necessity a cousin
germane, leaning to become an ally, of the Philistines--the founders and
main supporters of his book of the Law. And so, between the nature of
his blood, and the inclination of his mind, Alvan set his heart on a
damsel of the Philistines, endowed with their trained elegancies and
governed by some of their precepts, but suitable to his wildness in her
reputation for originality, suiting him in her cultivated liveliness and
her turn for luxury. Only the Philistines breed these choice beauties,
put forth these delicate fresh young buds of girls; and only here and
there among them is there an exquisite, eccentric, yet passably decorous
Clotilde. What his brother politicians never discovered in him, and the
baroness partly suspected, through her interpretation of things opposing
her sentiments, Clotilde uncloaks. Catching and mastering her, his
wilder animation may be appeased, but his political life is threatened
with a diversion of its current, for he will be uxorious, impassioned to
gratify the tastes and whims of a youthful wife; the Republican will be
in