He rose from his seat and seized his hair with both hands; then constrained himself to endurance, and sat down again.
"My dear young lady, we don't publish; we don't intend to publish. No man in his senses would publish for us if we were never so well inclined. No one could sell six copies. The great, thick-headed public couldn't understand us. We are satisfied that the true artist never does have a public—or look for it. The public can have their Tennysons, and Brownings, and Swinburnes, and Tuppers, and all that lot——"
"That lot!" broke in Miss Blanchet, mildly horrified—"that lot! Browning and Tupper put together!"
"My dear Mary, I don't know one of these people from another; I never read any of them now. They are all the same sort of thing to me. These persons are not artists; they are only men trying to amuse the public. Some of them, I am told, are positively fond of politics."
"Don't your school care for politics?" Miss Grey asked, now growing rather amused.
"Oh, no; we never trouble ourselves about such things. What can it matter whether the Reform bill is carried—is there a Reform bill going on now?—I believe there always is—or what becomes of the Eastern Question, or whether New Zealand has a constitution? These are questions for vestrymen, not artists; we don't love man."
"There I am with you," Miss Grey said; "if that alone were qualification enough, I should be glad to be one of your fraternity, for I don't love man; I think he is a poor creature at his best."
"So do I," said the poet, turning toward her with eyes in which for the moment a deep and genuine feeling seemed to light up; "the poorest creature, at his best! Why should any one turn aside for a moment from his path to help such a thing? What does it matter, the welfare of him and his pitiful race? Let us sing, and play, and paint, and forget him and the destiny that he makes such a work about. Wisdom only consists in shutting our ears to his cries of ambition, and jealousy, and pain, and being happy in our own way and forgetting him."
Their eyes met for a moment, and then Minola lowered hers. In that instant a gleam of sympathy had passed from her eyes into his, and he knew it. She felt a little humiliated somehow, like a proud fencer suddenly disarmed at the first touch of his adversary. For, as he was speaking scorn of the human race, she was saying to herself, "This man, I do believe, has suffered deeply. He has found people cold, and mean, and selfish—as I have—and he feels it, and cannot hide it. I did him wrong; he is not a fribble or sham cynic, only a disappointed dreamer." The sympathy which she felt showed itself only too quickly in her very eloquent eyes.
Herbert Blanchet rose after an instant of silence and took his leave, asking permission to call again, which Miss Grey would have gladly refused if she could have stood up against the appealing looks of Mary. So she had to grant him the permission, thinking as she gave it that another path of her liberty was closed.