I dropped my eyes and was annoyed at the way he spoke to me, but in the evening I studied the books. The theory of poetry I treated with special attention, and after I had acquainted myself a little more closely with its many rules and ways, I found out soon enough what was the matter with my poems. I kept on studying it most diligently, and a few weeks afterwards I wrote a new poem, for which I got much credit from my friend. "Let me congratulate you on your 'very first' poem," he said. His praise had made me boundlessly happy and proud. With terrible certainty I had comprehended that I was socially far removed from him; that I could never hold the balance against him; that I was a girl so poor, so meaningless, whose dreams--nay, not even whose boldest dreams--were permitted to soar so high. But it was different now. A feeling of bewildering sweetness told me that this aristocratic man, to my ideas like a foreign bird with glittering wings, had deigned to rest himself in the quiet woodlands of my soul, ready to fly away again as soon as my flowers had faded and my larks had gone away to die. Realizing the last, I felt a bitter pang. No; that mystic stranger who by a sweet whim of fate had, as it were, come to stay with me for a while, must go away no more. No, never. All splendour would vanish, all brightness would fade, and the heart would forget how to sing. All and everything would go with him: that glorious expectation, never owned and all unconscious, telling me softly, softly, a wondrous, wondrous tale; that strange, delightful embarrassment, that at the sight of him had often, often set my feet and heart a-tremble; those waves of infinite tenderness, gushing up suddenly from depths unfathomable--all and everything would go. Something was roused within me, uplifting itself against that desolation, growing and growing until it towered above all anxiety and fear--a new self-consciousness together with a new strength. Thus I commenced to fight the battle that each woman is called upon to fight once at least, and which is more formidable than all the battles of war that have ever been fought by man. Chapter XII