“But do we not inherit our reason just as much as we inherit our feelings?”

They had argued that point.  She could not remember what his argument was, but she remembered that she had held her ground, that he had complimented her, not forgetting, however, to take the credit of the improvement in her intellectual equipment to himself, which was indeed no more than just.  She would have been nothing without him.  How he had altered her!  She had come to think and feel like him.  She often caught herself saying exactly what he would say in certain circumstances, and having heard him say how odours affected him, she had tried to acquire a like sensibility.  Unconsciously she had assimilated a great deal.  That little trick of his, using his eyes a certain way, that knowing little glance of his had become habitual to her.  She had met men who were more profound, never anyone whose mind was more alert, more amusing and sufficient for every occasion.  She sentimentalised a moment, and then remembered further similarities.  They now ate the same dishes, and no longer had need to consult each other before ordering dinner.  In their first week in Paris she had learnt to look forward to chocolate in the morning before she got up, and this taste was endeared to her, for it reminded her of him.  In the picture galleries she had always tried to pick out the pictures he would like.  If they could not decide how a passage should be sung, or were in doubt regarding the attitude and gesture best fitted to carry on a dramatic action, she had noticed that, if they separated so that they might arrive at individual conclusions, they almost always happened upon the same.  To each other they now affected not to know from whom a certain quaint notion had come—­clearly it had been inspired by him, but which had first expressed it was not sure—­that the three great type operas were “Tristan and Isolde,” the “Barber of Seville,” and “La Belle Helene.”  Nor were they sure which had first suggested that in the last week of her stage career she should appear in all three parts.  Evelyn Innes, as La Belle Helene, would set musical London by the ears.

She had often wondered whether, by having absorbed so much of Owen’s character, she had proved herself deficient in character.  Owen maintained, on the contrary, that the sign of genius is the power of recognising and assimilating that which is necessary to the development of oneself.  He mentioned Goethe’s life, which he said was but the tale of a long assimilation of ideas.  The narrow, barren soul is narrow and barren because it cannot acquire.  We come into the world with nothing in our own right except the capacity for the acquisition of ideas.  We cannot invent ideas; we can only gather some of those in circulation since the beginning of the world.  We endow them with the colour and form of our time, and, if that colour and form be of supreme quality, the work is preserved as representative of a period in the history