Late in the afternoon he alighted at the hotel he called Clotilde's.

A letter was handed to him.

His eyes all over the page caught the note of it for her beginning of the battle and despair at the first repulse.

'And now my turn!' said he, not overjoyously.

The words Jew and demagogue and baroness, quoted in the letter, were old missiles hurling again at him.
But Clotilde's parents were yet to learn that this Jew, demagogue, and champion of an injured lady, was a gentleman respectful to their legal and natural claims upon their child while maintaining his own: they were to know him and change their tone.
As he was reading the letter upstairs by sentences, his door opened at the answer to a tap.