Maurice sighed.
‘And you think I have never suffered?’
‘He must be a man who has loved a false and foolish woman, and who has been stung to the quick by remorse for his own weakness.’
‘Ah, we are all of us weak once in our lives, and apt to be deceived, Justina. Happy the man who knows no second weakness, and is not twice deceived.’
He said this gravely enough for poet and thinker. Justina looked at him with a puzzled expression.
‘Now you seem quite a different person,’ she said. ‘I could almost fancy you capable of being a poet. I know there are glimpses of poetry in your talk sometimes.’
‘When I talk to you, Justina. Some people have an influence that is almost inspiration. All manner of bright thoughts come to me when you and I are together.’
‘That cannot be true,’ she said. ‘It is you who bring the bright thoughts to me. Consider how ignorant I am, and how much you know—all the great world of poetry, of which so many doors are barred against me. You read Goethe and Schiller. You go into that solemn temple where the Greek poets live in their strange old world. When you took me to the museum the other day, you pointed out all the statues, and talked of them as familiarly as if they had been the statues of your own friends. While I, who have hardly a schoolgirl’s knowledge of French, cannot even read that Alfred de Musset of whom you talk so much.’
‘You know the language in which Shakespeare wrote. You have all that is noblest and grandest in human literature in your hand when you take up that calf-bound, closely printed, double-columned volume yonder, from the old Chiswick press. I think an English writer who never read anything beyond his Bible and his Shakespeare would have a nobler style than the man of widest reading, who had not those two books in his heart of hearts. Other poets are poets. That one man was the god of poetry. But we will read some of De Musset’s poems together, Justina, and I will teach you something more than a schoolgirl’s French.’
After this it became an established thing for Maurice and Justina to read together for an hour or so, just as it was an established thing for Maurice to drop in at tea-time. He made his selections from De Musset discreetly, and then passed on to Victor Hugo; and thus that more valuable part of education which begins when a schoolgirl has been ‘finished’ was not wanting to Justina. Never was a pupil brighter or more intelligent. Never master more interested in his work.