ty modest sort of thing--but you
must know better than I that there are young men of genius--ay, of real
genius--trying to make a living in London by writings that perhaps their
own generation will never understand. There is what seems to me the hard
thing." Mr. Heron grew quite animated.

The words sent a keen pang through Blanchet's heart. His new
acquaintance, whom Blanchet assumed to be confoundedly wealthy,
evidently regarded him as a person equally favored by fortune, and
therefore only writing poetry to indulge the whim of his genius. Herbert
Blanchet had heard from the Money women, in a vague sort of way, that
Mr. Heron had been a governor of some place; it might have been Canada
or India for aught he knew to the contrary; and he assumed that he must
be a very aristocratic and self-conceited person. Blanchet would not for
the world have admitted at that moment that he was poor; and he
shuddered at the idea that Heron might somehow learn all about Mary
Blanchet's official position in the court-house of Duke's Keeton. For
all the dignity of poetry and high art, Mr. Blanchet was impressed with
a painful consciousness of being small somehow in the company of Mr.
Heron. It was not merely because he supposed Heron to be wealthy, for he
knew Mrs. Money was rich, and that Lucy would be an heiress; and yet he
was always quite at his ease with them, and accustomed to give himself
airs and to be made much of; but it occurred to him that Mr. Heron's
family, friends, and familiar surroundings would probably be very
different from his; and he always found himself at home in the society
of women, whom he knew that he could impress and impose on by his
handsome presence. Yes, he felt himself rather small in the society of
this pleasant, simple, unpretending young man, who was all the time
looking up to him as a poet and a child of genius.

Greatly pleased was the poet and child of genius when Victor Heron asked
him to come into his rooms and smoke a cigar before going to bed.

"You don't sleep much or keep early hours, I dare say, Mr. Blanchet;
literary men don't, I suppose; and I only sleep when I can't help it.
Let us smoke and have a talk for an hour or two."

"Night is my day," said Blanchet. "I don't think people who have minds
can talk well in the hours before midnight. When I have to work in the
day I sometimes close my shutters, light my gas, and fancy I am under
the influences of night."

"I got the way of sitting