the valley; and now it lay smooth and cold and blue-white, like the
sea under a winter sky. They might have been looking down on some
mysterious world made before man. No land was to be seen save the tops
of the hills lashed by the torn edges of the mist. Westward, across
the bay, the peaks of the cliffs showed like a low, flat coast, a dull
purplish line tormented by a livid surf. The flooded valley had become
an arm of that vague sea. And from under the fog, immeasurably far
below, there came the muffled sound of the mother sea, as if it were
beating on the invisible floor of the world.

"I say, that's rather uncanny, isn't it?" So uncanny did it seem to
him that he felt that it called for remark.

She looked at him with that faintly interrogative lifting of the
eyebrows, which always seemed familiar to him. He remembered
afterwards that Horace Jewdwine had the same trick. But in her,
accompanied as it was by a pretty lifting of the corners of her mouth,
it expressed friendly interest, in Jewdwine, apathy and a certain
insolence. And yet all the time she was wondering how she should break
it to him that their ways must now diverge.

"There's a horrible unconsciousness about it," he went on, pursuing as
usual his own fancy. "If you _could_ get bare nature without spirit,
it would look like that."

"It _doesn't_ look quite real," she admitted. (After that, there must
be no more concessions. They must separate.)

"It hasn't any reality but what we give it."

"Hasn't it?"

(A statement so sweeping challenged contradiction.)

"You think that's only my Cockney view?"

"I think it isn't Nature. It's your own idea."

"It isn't even my own idea; I bagged it from Coleridge. P'raps you'll
say he muddled himself with opium till he couldn't tell which was
Nature and which was Coleridge; but there was old Wordsworth, as sober
as a churchwarden, and he knew. What you call my Cockney view is the
view of the modern poets. They don't--they can't distinguish between
Nature and the human soul. Talk of getting near to Nature--we wouldn't
know Nature if we saw it now. Those everlasting poets have got so near
it that they've blocked the view for themselves and everybody else."

"Really, you talk as if they were a set of trippers."

"So they are! Wordsworth was nothing but a tripper, a glorified
tripper. Nature never looked the same since he ran his Excursion-train
through the Lake country--special service to Tintern and Yarrow