retort of his employment of metaphor when the figure served his purpose.

'Marvellously,' cried Alvan, 'marvellously that girl answered to my lead!
and to-morrow--you'll own me right--I must double the attraction.
I shall have to hand her back to her people for twenty-four hours, and
the dose must be doubled to keep her fast and safe. You see I read her
flatly. I read and am charitable. I have a perfect philosophical
tolerance. I'm in the mood to-day of Horace hymning one of his fair
Greeks.'

'No, no that is a comparison past my endurance,' interposed the baroness.
'Friend Sigismund, you have no philosophy, you never had any; and the
small crow and croon of Horace would be the last you could take up. It
is the chanted philosophy of comfortable stipendiaries, retired
merchants, gouty patients on a restricted allowance of the grape, old men
who have given over thinking, and young men who never had feeling--the
philosophy of swine grunting their carmen as they turn to fat in the sun.
Horace avaunt! You have too much poetry in you to quote that unsanguine
sensualist for your case. His love distressed his liver, and gave him a
jaundice once or twice, but where his love yields its poor ghost to his
philosophy, yours begins its labours. That everlasting Horace! He is
the versifier of the cushioned enemy, not of us who march along flinty
ways: the piper of the bourgeois in soul, poet of the conforming
unbelievers!'

'Pyrrha, Lydia, Lalage, Chloe, Glycera,' Alvan murmured, amorous of the
musical names. 'Clotilde is a Greek of one of the Isles, an Ionian. I
see her in the Horatian ode as in one of those old round shield-mirrors
which give you a speck of the figure on a silver-solar beam, brilliant,
not much bigger than a dewdrop. And so should a man's heart reflect her!