ASTRAEA: We may be excellent friends. And I have faults. ARDEN: Name them: I am hungering for more to love. ASTRAEA: I waver very constantly: I have No fixity of feeling or of sight. I have no courage: I can often dream Of daring: when I wake I am in dread. I am inconstant as a butterfly, And shallow as a brook with little fish! Strange little fish, that tempt the small boy’s net, But at a touch straight dive! I am any one’s, And no one’s! I am vain. Praise of my beauty lodges in my ears. The lark reels up with it; the nightingale Sobs bleeding; the flowers nod; I could believe A poet, though he praised me to my face. ARDEN: Never had poet so divine a fount To drink of! ASTRAEA: Have I given you more to love ARDEN: More! You have given me your inner mind, Where conscience in the robes of Justice shoots Light so serenely keen that in such light Fair infants, I newly criminal of earth,’ As your friend Osier says, might show some blot. Seraphs might! More to love? Oh! these dear faults Lead you to me like troops of laughing girls With garlands. All the fear is, that you trifle, Feigning them. ASTRAEA: For what purpose? ARDEN: Can I guess? ASTRAEA: I think ‘tis you who have the trifler’s note. My hearing is acute, and when you speak, Two voices ring, though you speak fervidly. Your Osier quotation jars. Beware! Why were you absent from our meeting-place This morning? ARDEN: I was on the way, and met Your uncle Homeware ASTRAEA: Ah! ARDEN: He loves you. ASTRAEA: He loves me: he has never understood. He loves me as a creature of the flock; A little whiter than some others. Yes; He loves me, as men love; not to uplift; Not to have faith in; not to spiritualize. For him I am a woman and a widow One of the flock, unmarked save by a brand. He said it!--You confess it! You have learnt To share his error, erring fatally. ARDEN: By whose advice went I to him? ASTRAEA: By whose? Pursuit that seemed incessant: persecution. Besides, I have changed since then: I change; I change; It is too true I change. I could esteem You better did you change. And had you heard The noble words this morning from the mouth Of our professor, changed were you, or raised Above love-thoughts, love-talk, and flame and flutter, High as eternal snows. What said he else, My uncle Homeware? ARDEN: That you were not free: And that he counselled us to use our wits.