"I thought all you poets affected to be in love with Nature," she said. "I mean you younger poets," and she emphasized the word "younger" with a certain contemptuous tone, which made it just what it meant to be--"smaller poets." "Why younger poets?" "Well, because the elder ones I think really were in love with Nature, and didn't affect anything." He smiled pityingly. "No," he said decisively, "we don't care about Nature--our school." "I am from the country; I don't think I know what your school is." "We don't want to be known in the country; we couldn't endure to be known in the country." "But fame?" Minola asked--"does fame not go outside the twelve-mile radius?" "Oh, Miss Grey, do pray excuse me, but you really don't understand us; we don't want fame. What is fame? Vulgarity made immortal." "Then what do you publish for?" He rose from his seat and seized his hair with both hands; then constrained himself to endurance, and sat down again. "My dear young lady, we don't publish; we don't intend to publish. No man in his senses would publish for us if we were never so well inclined. No one could sell six copies. The great, thick-headed public couldn't understand us. We are satisfied that the true artist never does have a public--or look for it. The public can have their Tennysons, and Brownings, and Swinburnes, and Tuppers, and all that lot----" "That lot!" broke in Miss Blanchet, mildly horrified--"that lot! Browning and Tupper put together!" "My dear Mary, I don't know one of these people from another; I never read any of them now. They are all the same sort of thing to me. These persons are not artists; they are only men trying to amuse the public. Some of them, I am told, are positively fond of politics." "Don't your school care for politics?" Miss Grey asked, now growing rather amused. "Oh, no; we never trouble ourselves about such things. What can it matter whether the Reform bill is carried--is there a Reform bill going on now?--I believe there always is--or what becomes of the Eastern Question, or whether New Zealand has a constitution? These are questions for vestrymen, not artists; we don't love man." "There I am with you," Miss Grey said; "if that alone were qualification enough, I should be glad to be one of your fraternity, for I don't love man; I think he is a poor creature at his best." "So do I," said the poet, turning toward her with eyes in which for the moment a deep and genuine feeling seemed to light up; "the poorest creature, at his best! Why should any one turn aside for a moment from his path to help such a thing? What does it matter, the welfare of him and his pitiful race? Let us sing, and play, and paint, and forget him and the destiny that he makes such a work about. Wisdom only consists in shutting our ears to his cries of ambition, and jealousy, and pain, and being happy in our own way and forgetting him."