And indeed the glamour of Ellaline was over every page of it. As he read, he found tears of tenderness in his eyes, when otherwise they might have sprung from laughter. He adored the little cherub who sat up aloft on the officers' table and softened these crusty sea-dogs whose hearts were become as ship's-biscuits. He could not tell what had come over himself, that his own sere heart should be so quick again to the beauties of homely virtue and duty, to the engaging simplicity and pathos of childhood, to the purity of womanhood. Was it that Ellaline was all these things incarnate?
He avowed his error and his conversion, and gradually they came to meet often in the solitary creek, as was but right for the only two intellectual people in Trepolpen. Sometimes, too, they wandered further afield, amid the ferny lanes. But the Cove was their favorite trysting place, and there lying with his head in her lap, he would talk to her of books and men and one woman.
Talked to her of books and men and one woman.
He found her tastes were not limited to The Cherub That Sits Up Aloft, for she liked Meredith. "Really," he said, "if you had not been yourself, I should have doubted whether your admiration was genuine."
"Yes, his women are so real. But I do not pretend to care for the style."
"Style!" he said, "I call it a five-barred fence. To me style is everything. Style alone is literature, whether it be the man or not."
"Oh, then you are of the school of Addiper?"
"Ah, have you heard of that? I am. I admire Addiper and agree with him. Form is everything—literature is only a matter of form. And a book is only a form of matter."
"I see," she said, smiling. "But I adore Addiper myself, though I regret the future seems likely to be his. I have read all he has written. Every line is so lucid. The form is exquisite. But as for the matter——!"