hus they talked on about Sirius, and then about other stars

. . . in the scrowl
Of all those beasts, and fish, and fowl,
With which, like Indian plantations,
The learned stock the constellations,

till he asked her how many stars she thought were visible to them at that
moment.

She looked around over the magnificent stretch of sky that their high
position unfolded. 'Oh, thousands, hundreds of thousands,' she said
absently.

'No. There are only about three thousand. Now, how many do you think
are brought within sight by the help of a powerful telescope?'

'I won't guess.'

'Twenty millions. So that, whatever the stars were made for, they were
not made to please our eyes. It is just the same in everything; nothing
is made for man.'

'Is it that notion which makes you so sad for your age?' she asked, with
almost maternal solicitude. 'I think astronomy is a bad study for you.
It makes you feel human insignificance too plainly.'

'Perhaps it does. However,' he added more cheerfully, 'though I feel the
study to be one almost tragic in its quality, I hope to be the new
Copernicus. What he was to the solar system I aim to be to the systems
beyond.'

Then, by means of the instrument at hand, they travelled together from
the earth to Uranus and the mysterious outskirts of the solar system;
from the solar system to a star in the Swan, the nearest fixed star in
the northern sky; from the star in the Swan to remoter stars; thence to
the remotest visible; till the ghastly chasm which they had bridged by a
fragile line of sight was realized by Lady Constantine.

'We are now traversing distances beside which the immense line stretching
from the earth to the sun is but an invisible point,' said the youth.
'When, just now, we had reached a planet whose remoteness is a hundred
times the remoteness of the sun from the earth, we were only a two
thousandth part of the journey to the spot at which we have optically
arrived now.'

'Oh, pray don't; it overpowers me!' she replied, not without seriousness.
'It makes me feel that it is not worth while to live; it quite
annihilates me.'

'If it annihilates your ladyship to roam over these yawning spaces just
once, think how it must annihilate me to be, as it were, in constant
suspension amid them night after night.'

'Yes. . . . It was not really this subject that I came to see you upon,
Mr. St. Cleeve,' she began a second time. 'It was a personal matter