ssess them, he could not doubt his power of winning
her. Barriers are for those who cannot fly. The barriers were palpable
about a girl of noble Christian birth: so was the courage in her which
would give her wings, he thought, coming to that judgement through the
mixture of his knowledge of himself and his perusal of her exterior.
He saw that she could take an impression deeply enough to express it
sincerely, and he counted on it, sympathetically endowing her with his
courage to support the originality she was famed for.

They were interrupted between-whiles by weariful men running to Alvan
for counsel on various matters--how to play their game, or the exact
phrasing of some pregnant sentence current in politics or literature.
He satisfied them severally and shouldered them away, begging for peace
that night. Clotilde corroborated his accurate recital of the lines of
a contested verse of the incomparable Heinrich, and they fell to capping
verses of the poet-lucid metheglin, with here and there no dubious
flavour of acid, and a lively sting in the tail of the honey. Sentiment,
cynicism, and satin impropriety and scabrous, are among those verses,
where pure poetry has a recognized voice; but the lower elements
constitute the popularity in a cultivated society inclining to
wantonness out of bravado as well as by taste. Alvan, looking
indolently royal and royally roguish, quoted a verse that speaks of the
superfluousness of a faithless lady's vowing bite:

'The kisses were in the course of things,
The bite was a needless addition.'

Clotilde could not repress her reddening--Count Kollin had repeated too
much! She dropped her eyes, with a face of sculpture, then resumed their
chatter. He spared her the allusion to Pompeius. She convinced him of
her capacity for reserve besides intrepidity, and flattered him too with
her blush. She could dare to say to Kollin what her scarlet sensibility
forbade her touching on with him: not that she would not have had an
airy latitude with him to touch on what she pleased: he liked her for
her boldness and the cold peeping of the senses displayed in it: he
liked also the distinction she made.

The cry to supper conduced to a further insight of her adaptation to
his requirements in a wife. They marched to the table together, and sat
together, and drank a noble Rhine wine together--true Rauenthal. His
robustness of body and soul inspired the wish that his well-born wife
mig