."

"This is slightly profane."

"No--it only means that if you want Nature you musn't go to the poets
of Nature. They've humanized it. I wouldn't mind that, if they hadn't
womanized it, too."

"That only means that they loved it," she said softly.

"It means that they've demoralized it; and that now it demoralizes us.
Nature is the supreme sentimentalist. It's all their fault. They've
been flinging themselves on the bosom of Mother Earth, and sitting and
writing Stanzas in Dejection on it, and lying down like a tired child
on it, and weeping away their lives of care, that they have borne and
yet must bear on it, till they've saturated it with their beastly
pathos. There isn't a dry comfortable place left for anybody else."

"Perhaps that's just the way Nature inspires poets, by giving out the
humanity it absorbs."

"Perhaps. I can't say it inspires me."

"Are you a poet?" she asked. She was beginning to think it must be a
case of mistaken identity; for this was not what she had expected of
him.

He did not answer at first, neither did he look at her. He looked at
the beautiful face of Nature (the sentimentalist), and a wave of hot
colour rushed again over his own.

"I don't know whether I am or not."

"Let us hope not, since you want to make a clean sweep of them."

"I'd make a clean sweep of myself if I stood in my own light. Anything
for a good view. But I'm afraid it's too late." His tone dropped from
the extreme of levity to an almost tragic earnest. "We've done our
work, and it can't be undone. We've given Nature a human voice, and
now we shall never--never hear anything else."

"That's rather dreadful; I wish you hadn't."

"Oh, no, you don't. It's not the human voice you draw the line
at--it's the Cockney accent."

Lucia's smile flickered and went out, extinguished by the waves of her
blush. She was not prepared to have her thoughts read--and read aloud
to her--in this way; and that particular thought was one she would
have preferred him not to read.

"I daresay Keats had a Cockney accent, if we did but know; and I
daresay a good many people never heard anything else."

"I'm afraid you'd have heard it yourself, Miss Harden, if you'd met
him."

"Possibly. It isn't what I should have remembered him by, though. That
reminds me. I came upon a poem--a sonnet--of yours--if it was
yours--this morning. It was lying on the library floor. You will find
it under the bronze Pallas on the table."

Mr.