Jane bit her lips. This "learned pedant," as she had called him this very morning, was revealing himself in strange ways. Poetic at one moment, he could be cruelly sarcastic at the next; but she was better adapted to this tone; here she could meet him as equal meets equal! The young lady in her vexation, quite overlooked the deep and painful excitement which had goaded the professor to a bitterness so unusual with him; and she did not cease her thrusts. She could not deny herself the dangerous satisfaction of calling forth those lightning-like gleams of anger from the calm, dreamy, superficial being of this man;--gleams which betrayed passionate depths perhaps unknown to him. She felt that only in moments of the highest inspiration or of the highest exasperation, was he capable of these, and as it was beyond her power to inspire him, she resolved to exasperate him. "I wonder so much the more, Professor Fernow, that you have guarded this susceptibility in so extraordinary a way; but really, in dreaming and poetizing, the Germans were always in advance of us." "In two things which stand infinitely low in your esteem!" "I, at least, am of the opinion that man was created for deeds and not for dreams! This poetizing is only listless dreaming." "And consequently you despise it!" "_Yes!_" Jane was fully conscious of the cruelty with which she uttered this rough _yes_, but she had been challenged, she resolved to wound; and it seemed indeed as if she had succeeded. A deep red flush mounted to Fernow's forehead. Strange--he had taken it so calmly when she sought to disparage science, but her attack upon poetry he would not bear. "You ought to be less prodigal of your contempt, Miss Forest," he said, "and there are things which deserve it more than our poetry." "Of which I have no conception." "For which you _will_ have none, and which will yet assert its right, like the home-bud at that very moment when you called it poor and narrow." Jane was for a moment speechless with pride and anger. What had taught this man, who in his revenge and absence of mind often forgot the simplest, most familiar things, to glance so deeply into her soul, although her features never betrayed what was passing there? What induced him, with such exasperating clearness, to bring to light sentiments which she herself would not confess? For the first time that indefinable oppression she always experienced in his presence, found a decided reason; she felt dimly that in some way danger threatened her from this man; that she must at any price hold herself far from him, even on account of this one provocation.