s responsible
for all this. He perceived the real nature of the things he had
pursued so passionately, the thing he called pleasure, the thing he
called love, and the thing he called his imagination. His notion of
pleasure was getting drunk and making love to Miss Poppy Grace; the
love he made was better described by a stronger and coarser
monosyllable, and he had used his imagination to glorify it. Oh yes,
because he had imagination, because he was a poet, he had not gone
down into the clay-pits and wallowed in the clay; neither had he been
content to dabble in it; he had taken it up in his hands and moulded
it into the form of a divinity, and then fallen down and worshipped
it. Fallen down and worshipped at the feet, the gaily twirling feet of
Miss Poppy Grace.

Poor Poppy, if he could have thought of her at all, he might have felt
a sort of pity for her transience, the transience of the feeling she
inspired. But he did not think of her; he did not even try to think
of her. Her image, once so persistent, had dropped clean out of his
mind, which was one reason why it was so empty. It had not been much
to boast of, that infatuation for Poppy, and yet somehow, after living
so intimately with it, he felt quite lost without it. It was a little
odd, if you came to think of it, that the thing he called his genius,
and the thing he called his love, should have chosen the same moment
to abandon him. Was it--was it possible--that there was some vital
connection between them? As the singing of birds in the pairing
season, was his genius merely a rather peculiar symptom of the very
ordinary condition known as falling in love? So that, failing that
source of inspiration--? That no doubt _was_ what was the matter with
him. His imagination languished because his passion for Poppy was
played out, and he had nothing to put in its place.

Well, yes, there was something; something that was not an instinct or
a passion, but an acquired taste. To be sure he had acquired it very
quickly, it had only taken him three days. In those three days he had
developed a preference for the society of ladies (the women of his own
class were not ladies but "young ladies," a distinction he now
appreciated for the first time). It was a preference that, as things
stood, he would never be able to gratify; there was something about it
ruinous and unhappy, like a craze for first editions in an impecunious
scholar, for ever limited to the twopenny bundle and