was present, and was there: a direction of a nod that any quick-witted
damsel must pretend to think sufficient, so Clotilde slipped from her
companion and gazed into the recess of a doorless inner room, where three
gentlemen stood, backed by book cases, conversing in blue vapours of
tobacco. They were indistinct; she could see that one of them was of
good stature. One she knew; he was the master of the house, mildly
Jewish. The third was distressingly branded with the slum and gutter
signs of the Ahasuerus race. Three hats on his head could not have done
it more effectively. The vindictive caricatures of the God Pan, executed
by priests of the later religion burning to hunt him out of worship in
the semblance of the hairy, hoofy, snouty Evil One, were not more
loathsome. She sank on a sofa. That the man? Oh! Jew, and fifty times
over Jew! nothing but Jew!

The three stepped into the long saloon, and she saw how veritably
magnificent was the first whom she had noticed.

She sat at her lamb's-wool work in the little ivory frame, feeding on the
contrast. This man's face was the born orator's, with the light-giving
eyes, the forward nose, the animated mouth, all stamped for speechfulness
and enterprise, of Cicero's rival in the forum before he took the
headship of armies and marched to empire.

The gifts of speech, enterprise, decision, were marked on his features
and his bearing, but with a fine air of lordly mildness. Alas, he could
not be other than Christian, so glorious was he in build! One could
vision an eagle swooping to his helm by divine election. So vigorously
rich was his blood that the swift emotion running with the theme as he
talked pictured itself in passing and was like the play of sheet
lightning on the variations of the uninterrupted and many-glancing