[The Tragic Comedians by George Meredith]@TWC D-Link bookThe Tragic Comedians CHAPTER V 15/24
Alvan and he murmured aside.
They spoke of it: What wonder that Alvan, though he saw Prince Marko whirl her in the dance, and keep her to the measure--dancing like a song of the limbs in his desperate poor lover's little flitting eternity of the possession of her--should say, after she had been led back to her friends: 'That is he, then! one of the dragons guarding my apple of the Hesperides, whom I must brush away.' 'He ?' replied Clotilde, sincerely feeling Marko to be of as fractional a weight as her tone declared him.
'Oh, he is my mute, harmless, he does not count among the dragons.' But there had been, notwithstanding the high presumption of his remark, a manful thickness of voice in Alvan's 'That is he!' The rivals had fastened a look on one another, wary, strong, and summary as the wrestlers' first grapple.
In fire of gaze, Marko was not outdone. 'He does not count? With those eyes of his ?' Alvan exclaimed.
He knew something of the sex, and spied from that point of knowledge into the character of Clotilde; not too venturesomely, with the assistance of rumour, hazarding the suspicion which he put forth as a certainty, and made sharply bitter to himself in proportion to the belief in it that his vehemence engendered: 'I know all--without exception; all, everything; all! I repeat.
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