She looked at him with that faintly interrogative lifting of the eyebrows, which always seemed familiar to him. He remembered afterwards that Horace Jewdwine had the same trick. But in her, accompanied as it was by a pretty lifting of the corners of her mouth, it expressed friendly interest, in Jewdwine, apathy and a certain insolence. And yet all the time she was wondering how she should break it to him that their ways must now diverge.
"There's a horrible unconsciousness about it," he went on, pursuing as usual his own fancy. "If you could get bare nature without spirit, it would look like that."
"It doesn't look quite real," she admitted. (After that, there must be no more concessions. They must separate.)
"It hasn't any reality but what we give it."
"Hasn't it?"
(A statement so sweeping challenged contradiction.)
"You think that's only my Cockney view?"
"I think it isn't Nature. It's your own idea."
"It isn't even my own idea; I bagged it from Coleridge. P'raps you'll say he muddled himself with opium till he couldn't tell which was Nature and which was Coleridge; but there was old Wordsworth, as sober as a churchwarden, and he knew. What you call my Cockney view is the view of the modern poets. They don't—they can't distinguish between Nature and the human soul. Talk of getting near to Nature—we wouldn't know Nature if we saw it now. Those everlasting poets have got so near it that they've blocked the view for themselves and everybody else."
"Really, you talk as if they were a set of trippers."