“I dislike the word love. It is coarse, and implies coarse feelings. It is a degrading impulse, shared with the beasts of the fields. Poets are responsible for having covered its unloveliness with a starry garment which has disguised--fatally disguised--its nakedness. What I feel for you is respect, esteem, the sweetness of fulfilled duty, the means of proving to the world the sincerity of my sociology.” “Yes, sir. You told me that afore.” “Well, what better sentiment can you desire? Love fills lunatic asylums, divorce courts, cemeteries, heats charcoal braziers, fires revolvers, gives human bodies to fishes; but such a sentiment as I have for you purifies society, advances civilisation, ensures mutual respect, and eliminates passion, the tyrant of man.” He stops abruptly, for before his memory floats the vision of Cecily Seymour, and he seems to hear her saying: “What heresy! And how untrue!” Annie murmurs, keeping her head down, and in a disappointed voice: “Yes, sir.” “You do not seem to understand! You are vexed?” “I’ll try to understand, sir. I’m only a poor girl, and all that you say is very beautiful, I dessay; but--it makes me think of a novel I got onst from the library, where a poor governess, without a umberellar or a friend, stands out in the rain and looks through the winder at a cosy kitchen, where they’re a-toastin’ muffins for tea, and a cat’s a-warming hisself at the fire.” “‘Jane Eyre.’ I fail to see the connection.” “Well, Mr. Bertram, I say it ill; but when you talk in that kind o’ way it makes me feel out in the cold like as that poor teacher was, and I think I’d rather have the fire and the muffins and the cat.” “I fear you are a sad Philistine, Annie.” “I don’t know what that is, sir. I daresay as it’s only that your beautiful talk’s too fine for me. I think I’ll go now. I didn’t ought to have dawdled here.” “You are crying, child!” “Oh, no, sir.” She gets up and hurries away. “O Heavens!” Bertram says to himself. “One does not go to that sturdy class to get a sensitive plant that droops at a touch. She says _liberry_ and _umberellar_. It is absurd that such a trifle should irritate one, but it does; it is like a grain of dust in one’s eye, a crumb of bread in one’s sock. What atoms they are, yet how miserable they can make one! And then her absolute inability to understand one! Love! Good gracious! She would want to have a bride cake from Gunter’s; a temple of Hymen in spun sugar!” The remembrance of Cicely Seymour’s fair face, with its tender, dreamy eyes and its beautiful mouth, comes over him. He shivers in the warmth of the pleasant and unusual sunshine. Marlow, who has left the ladies after his snubbing, passes him again, puts his glass in his eye, and gazes after Annie Brown.