did I not fancy?--never seeing how that
very "_he_" bespoke the indifference--the gulf between us. I was not a
man, an equal, but a thing--a subject, who was to be talked over and
examined, and made into something like themselves, of their supreme and
undeserved benevolence.

"Gently! Gently, fair lady!" said the dean. "We must not be as headlong
as some people would kindly wish to be. If this young man really has a
proper desire to rise to a higher station, and I find him a fit object
to be assisted in that praiseworthy ambition, why, I think he ought to
go to some training college. Now attend to me, sir! Recollect, if it
should be in our power to assist your prospects in life, you must give
up, once and for all, the bitter tone against the higher classes which I
am sorry to see in your MSS. Next, I think of showing these MSS. to my
publisher, to get opinion as to whether they are worth printing just
now. Not that it is necessary that you should be a poet. Most active
minds write poetry at a certain age. I wrote a good deal, I recollect,
myself. But that is no reason for publishing."

At this point Lillian fled the room, to my extreme disgust. But still
the old man prosed.

"I think, therefore, that you had better stay with your cousin for the
next week. I hear from Lord Lynedale that he is a very studious, moral,
rising young man, and I only hope that you will follow his good example.
At the end of the week I shall return home, and then I shall be glad to
see more of you at my house at D----. Good-morning!"

My cousin and I stayed at D---- long enough for the dean to get a reply
from the publishers concerning my poems. They thought that the sale of
the book might be greatly facilitated if certain passages of a strong
political tendency were omitted; they were somewhat too strong for the
present state of the public taste.

On the dean's advice, I weakly consented to have the book emasculated.
Next day I returned to town, for Sandy Mackaye had written me a
characteristic note telling me that he could deposit any trash I had
written in a paper called the "Weekly Warwhoop."

Before I went from D----, my cousin George warned me not to pay so much
attention to Miss Lillian if I wished to stand well with Eleanor, the
dean's niece, who was to marry Lord Lynedale. He left me suspecting that
he had remarked Eleanor's wish to cool my admiration for Lillian, and
was willing, for his own purposes, to further it.

_III.--