“I should recognize your hand anywhere! And more than that, I should only have to pick out the most rigid and unbending criticism to know which must be yours. It is your way, and you know it! Are you not always showing me up to myself! That’s why I was in such mortal terror of your finding out what I was doing. If you had said anything to make me hate my work,” she went on, looking up at him with earnest eyes, “I should never have touched it again; and I did want to finish it! You have been my master now for--let me see--how many months? I do not know how I shall ever thank you!” Here she changed tone. “If I come off with a pound of flesh left, it will be owing entirely to the pains you have taken with me! I wonder whether you will like any of my triolets! But it is time to dress for dinner, so I will leave you in peace--but not all night, for when you go to bed you shall take _your_ copy with you to help you asleep.” While dressing he was full of the dread of not liking the book well enough to praise it as he wished. A first book was nothing, he said to himself; it might be what it would; but the second--that was another matter! He recalled what first books he knew. “Poems by Two Brothers” gave not a foretaste of what was to come so soon after them! Shelley’s prose attempts in his boyhood were below criticism! Byron’s “Hours of Idleness” were as idle as he called them! He knew what followed these and others, but what had followed Lady Lufa’s? That he was now to discover! What if it should be no better than what preceded! For his own part he did not, he would not much care. It was not for her poetry, it was for herself he loved her! What she wrote was not she, and could make no difference! It was not as if she had no genuine understanding of poetry, no admiration or feeling for it! A poet could do well enough with a wife who never wrote a verse, but hardly with one who had no natural relation to it, no perception what it was! A poet in love with one who laughed at his poetry!--that would want scanning! What or wherein could be their relation to each other? He is a poor poet--and Walter was such a poet--who does not know there are better things than poetry. Keats began to discover it just ere he died. Walter feared therefore the coming gift, as he might that of a doubted enchantress. It was not the less a delight, however, to remember that she said “_your_ copy.” But he must leave thinking and put on his neck-tie! There are other things than time and tide that wait for no man! Lady Tremaine gave him Lufa, and she took his arm with old familiarity. The talk at table was but such as it could hardly help being--only for Walter it was talk with Lufa! The pleasure of talk often owes not much to the sense of it. There is more than the intellect concerned in talk; there is more at its root than fact or logic or lying.