"Dear child!" laughed Sir Archibald. "It looks very different in winter, I suspect."
"No doubt different, but still lovely. In winter I should love the fury of raging winds, and the roar of the waves of the fjord below my house, and grey mists would hang over the hills! I can see it all!"
"Why, you would be frozen," argued the father, gravely.
"Oh no; and I should sit at my turret window dreaming over Dante or Spenser. Do you love Dante and Spenser?"
The question was addressed to Frank, who had listened somewhat puzzled to Eva's raptures, and was now a little startled; for, you see, though he knew Dante by name, he had never even heard of the poet Spenser; only of Herbert Spencer.
"What, do you not know the Faery Queen, Una, and the Red-cross Knight, and Britomart? How very strange."
"Dear child, what a little fanatic you are over those silly allegories!" said papa.
"But they are glorious, papa!" Eva insisted. "Besides, I love allegory above all things, and admire no other kind of poetry."
"The style is so affected! You are drowned in symbolism!"
"It is the keynote of the Renaissance," Eva protested. "In the time of Elizabeth all the Court talked in that high-flown style. And Edmund Spenser's images are splendid; they sparkle like jewels!"