"Oh, they'll fly back again, you'll see, if you wait till next spring."
"You weren't serious just now when you asked me if I was a poet. I was serious enough when I said I didn't know."
Something passed over Lucia's face, a ripple of shadow and flame, some moving of the under currents of the soul that told him that he was understood, that something had happened there, something that for the moment permitted him to be personal.
"What made you say so?"
"I can't tell you. Not natural modesty. I'm modest about some things, but not about that."
"Yet surely you must know?"
"I did yesterday."
"Yesterday?"
"Yesterday—last night; in fact up to eleven o'clock this morning I firmly believed that I had genius, or something uncommonly like it. I still believe that I had it."
He seemed to himself to have become almost grossly personal; but to Lucia he had ceased to be personal at all; he had passed into the region of realities; and in so passing had become intensely interesting. To Lucia, with the blood of ten generations of scholars in her veins, the question of a man's talent was supremely important; the man himself might not matter, but his talent mattered very much; to discuss it with him was entirely natural and proper. So she never once stopped to ask herself why she was standing on Harcombe Hill, holding this really very intimate conversation with Mr. Rickman.