too, that he had already misrepresented himself, in giving her the impression that he was incapable of enjoying poetry of the more imaginative sort.  He had indeed in his youth been passionately fond of such verse.  Then came a time in which he turned from it with a sick dismay.  Feelings and memories of agony, which a word, a line, would rouse in him afresh, had brought him to avoid it with an aversion seemingly deep-rooted as an instinct, and mounting even to loathing; and when at length he cast from him the semi-beliefs of his education, he persuaded himself that he disliked it for its falsehood.  He read his philosophy by the troubled light of wrong and suffering, and that is not the light of the morning, but of a burning house.  Of all poems, naturally enough, he then disliked In Memoriam the most; and now it made him almost angry that Juliet Meredith should like so much what he so much disliked.  Not that he would have a lady indifferent to poetry.  That would argue a lack of poetry in herself, and such a lady would be like a scentless rose.  You could not expect, who indeed could wish a lady to be scientific in her ways of regarding things?  Was she not the live concentration, the perfect outcome, of the vast poetic show of Nature?  In shape, in motion of body and brain, in tone and look, in color and hair, in faithfulness to old dolls and carelessness of hearts, was she not the sublimation, the essence of sunsets, and fading roses, and butterflies, and snows, and running waters, and changing clouds, and cold, shadowy moonlight?  He argued thus more now in sorrow than in anger; for what was the woman but a bubble on the sand of the infinite soulless sea—­a bubble of a hundred lovely hues, that must shine because it could not help it, and for the same reason break?  She was not to blame.  Let her shine and glow, and sparkle, and vanish.  For him, he cared for nothing but science—­nothing that did not promise one day to yield up its kernel to the seeker.  To him science stood for truth, and for truth in the inward parts stood obedience to the laws of Nature.  If he was one of a poor race, he would rise above his fellows by being good to them in their misery; while for himself he would confess to no misery.  Let the laws of Nature work—­eyeless and heartless as the whirlwind; he would live his life, be himself, be Nature, and depart without a murmur.  No scratch on the face of time, insignificant even as the pressure of a fern-leaf upon coal, should tell that he had ever thought his fate hard.  He would do his endeavor and die and return to nothing—­not then more dumb of complaint than now.  Such had been for years his stern philosophy, and why should it now trouble him that a woman thought differently?  Did the sound of faith from such lips, the look of hope in such eyes, stir any thing out of sight in his heart?  Was it for a moment as if the corner of a veil were lifted, the lower edge of a mist, and he saw something fair beyond?  Came there a little glow and flutter out of the old time?  “All forget,” he said to himself.  “I too have forgotten.  Why should not Nature forget?  Why should I be fooled any more?  Is it not enough?”