'Then,' the officer's voice was earnest, 'I pity him, and you no less,
while you remain strangers, for you were made for one another. Those
ideas you have expressed, nay, the very words, are Alvan's: I have heard
him use them. He has just the same original views of society and history
as yours; they're identical; your features are not unlike . . . you talk
alike: I could fancy your voice the sister of his. You look incredulous?
You were speaking of Pompeius, and you said "Plutarch's Pompeius," and
more for it is almost incredible under the supposition that you do not
know and have never listened to Alvan--you said that Pompeius appeared to
have been decorated with all the gifts of the Gods to make the greater
sacrifice of him to Caesar, who was not personally worth a pretty woman's
"bite." Come, now--you must believe me: at a supper at Alvan's table the
other night, the talk happened to be of a modern Caesar, which led to the
real one, and from him to "Plutarch's Pompeius," as Alvan called him; and
then he said of him what you have just said, absolutely the same down to
the allusion to the bite. I assure you. And you have numbers of little
phrases in common: you are partners in aphorisms: Barriers are for those
who cannot fly: that is Alvan's. I could multiply them if I could
remember; they struck me as you spoke.'

'I must be a shameless plagiarist,' said Clotilde.

'Or he,' said Count Kollin.

It is here the place of the Chorus to state that these: ideas were in the
air at the time; sparks of the Vulcanic smithy at work in politics and
pervading literature: which both Alvan and Clotilde might catch and give
out as their own, in the honest belief that the epigram was, original to
them. They were not members of a country where literature is confined to
its little paddock, without, influence on the larger field (part lawn,