So far, as far as she can be portrayed introductorily, she is not without exemplars in the sex. Young women have been known to turn from us altogether, never to turn back, so poor and shrunken, or so fleshly-bulgy have we all appeared in the fairy jacket they wove for the right one of us to wear becomingly. But the busy great world was round Clotilde while she was malleable, though she might be losing her fresh ideas of the hammer and the block, and that is a world of much solicitation to induce a vivid girl to merge an ideal in a living image. Supposing, when she has accomplished it, that men justify her choice, the living will retain the colours of the ideal. We have it on record that he may seem an eagle. ‘You talk curiously like Alvan, do you know,’ a gentleman of her country said to her as they were descending the rock of Capri, one day. He said it musingly. He belonged to a circle beneath her own: the learned and artistic. She had not heard of this Alvan, or had forgotten him; but professing universal knowledge, especially of celebrities, besides having an envious eye for that particular circle, which can pretend to be the choicest of all, she was unwilling to betray her ignorance, and she dimpled her cheek, as one who had often heard the thing said to her before. She smiled musingly. CHAPTER II ‘Who is the man they call Alvan?’ She put the question at the first opportunity to an aunt of hers. Up went five-fingered hands. This violent natural sign of horror was comforting: she saw that he was a celebrity indeed. ‘Alvan! My dear Clotilde! What on earth can you want to know about a creature who is the worst of demagogues, a disreputable person, and a Jew!’ Clotilde remarked that she had asked only who he was. ‘Is he clever?’ ‘He is one of the basest of those wretches who are for upsetting the Throne and Society to gratify their own wicked passions: that is what he is.’ ‘But is he clever?’ ‘Able as Satan himself, they say. He is a really dangerous, bad man. You could not have been curious about a worse one.’ ‘Politically, you mean.’ ‘Of course I do.’ The lady had not thought of any other kind of danger from a man of that station.