‘Perhaps it does. However,’ he added more cheerfully, ‘though I feel the study to be one almost tragic in its quality, I hope to be the new Copernicus. What he was to the solar system I aim to be to the systems beyond.’
Then, by means of the instrument at hand, they travelled together from the earth to Uranus and the mysterious outskirts of the solar system; from the solar system to a star in the Swan, the nearest fixed star in the northern sky; from the star in the Swan to remoter stars; thence to the remotest visible; till the ghastly chasm which they had bridged by a fragile line of sight was realized by Lady Constantine.
‘We are now traversing distances beside which the immense line stretching from the earth to the sun is but an invisible point,’ said the youth. ‘When, just now, we had reached a planet whose remoteness is a hundred times the remoteness of the sun from the earth, we were only a two thousandth part of the journey to the spot at which we have optically arrived now.’
‘Oh, pray don’t; it overpowers me!’ she replied, not without seriousness. ‘It makes me feel that it is not worth while to live; it quite annihilates me.’
‘If it annihilates your ladyship to roam over these yawning spaces just once, think how it must annihilate me to be, as it were, in constant suspension amid them night after night.’
‘Yes. . . . It was not really this subject that I came to see you upon, Mr. St. Cleeve,’ she began a second time. ‘It was a personal matter.’
‘I am listening, Lady Constantine.’
‘I will tell it you. Yet no,—not this moment. Let us finish this grand subject first; it dwarfs mine.’
It would have been difficult to judge from her accents whether she were afraid to broach her own matter, or really interested in his. Or a certain youthful pride that he evidenced at being the elucidator of such a large theme, and at having drawn her there to hear and observe it, may have inclined her to indulge him for kindness’ sake.
Thereupon he took exception to her use of the word ‘grand’ as descriptive of the actual universe: