Fortune had delayed, he had wintered long. All the sweeter was the
breath of the young Spring. That exquisite new sweetness robed Clotilde
in the attributes of the person dreamed of for his mate; and deductively
assuming her to possess 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.'