So she scanned the familiar bookshelves, then turned away; there was nothing there to meet her case.
She put on her dressing-gown and stole out softly across the passage to Leo’s empty room, where she remembered to have seen some books.
Here she set down the candle, and, as she looked round the dim walls, her thoughts went out suddenly to Leo himself, went out to him with a new tenderness, with something that was almost beyond comprehension.
She knew, though she did not use the word to herself, that after some blind, groping fashion of his own, Leo was an idealist—poor Leo!
There were books on a table near, and she took them up one by one: some volumes of Heine, in prose and verse; the operatic score of Parsifal; Donaldson on the Greek Theatre; and then two books of poetry, each of which, had she but known it, appealed strongly to two strongly marked phases of Leo’s mood—Poems and Ballads, and a worn green copy of the poems of Clough.
She turned over the leaves carelessly.
Poetry? Yes, she would try a little poetry. She had always enjoyed reading Tennyson and Shakespeare in the schoolroom. So she put the books under her arm, went back to her room, and crept into her little cold bed.
She took up the volume of Swinburne and began reading it mechanically by the flickering candlelight.
The rolling, copious phrases conveyed little meaning to her, but she liked the music of them. There was something to make a sophisticated onlooker laugh in the sight of this young, pure creature, with her strong, slow-growing passions, her strong, slow-growing intellect, bending over the diffuse, unreserved, unrestrained pages. She came at last to one poem, the Triumph of Time, which seemed to have more meaning than the others, and which arrested her attention, though even this was only comprehensible at intervals. She read on and on:—
“I have given no man of any fruit to eat;
I have trod the grapes, I have drunken the wine.
Had you eaten and drunken and found it sweet,
This wild new growth of the corn and vine,
This wine and bread without lees or leaven,
We had grown as gods, as the gods in heaven,
Souls fair to look upon, goodly to greet,
One splendid spirit, your soul and mine.