"I admire you all the more for that. It always seems to me that the poet degrades his art who hunts for popularity--the poet or anybody else for that matter," added Victor, thinking of his own unpopular performances in St. Xavier's Settlements. "I am delighted to meet you, Mr. Blanchet. I have seen so much hunting after popularity in England that I honor any man of genius who has the courage to set his face against it." "My latest volume of poems," Blanchet said firmly, "I do not even mean to publish. They shall be printed, I hope, and got out in a manner becoming of them--becoming, at least, of what I think of them; but they shall not be hawked about book shops and reviewed by self-conceited, ignorant prigs." "Quite right, Mr. Blanchet; just what I should like to do myself if I could possibly imagine myself gifted like you. But still you must admit that it is little to the credit of the age that a poet should be forced thus to keep his treasures from the public eye. Besides, it may be all very well, you know, in your case or mine; but think of a man of genius who has to live by his poems! It's easy talking for men who have enough--my enough, I confess, is a pretty modest sort of thing--but you must know better than I that there are young men of genius--ay, of real genius--trying to make a living in London by writings that perhaps their own generation will never understand. There is what seems to me the hard thing." Mr. Heron grew quite animated. The words sent a keen pang through Blanchet's heart. His new acquaintance, whom Blanchet assumed to be confoundedly wealthy, evidently regarded him as a person equally favored by fortune, and therefore only writing poetry to indulge the whim of his genius. Herbert Blanchet had heard from the Money women, in a vague sort of way, that Mr. Heron had been a governor of some place; it might have been Canada or India for aught he knew to the contrary; and he assumed that he must be a very aristocratic and self-conceited person. Blanchet would not for the world have admitted at that moment that he was poor; and he shuddered at the idea that Heron might somehow learn all about Mary Blanchet's official position in the court-house of Duke's Keeton. For all the dignity of poetry and high art, Mr. Blanchet was impressed with a painful consciousness of being small somehow in the company of Mr. Heron. It was not merely because he supposed Heron to be wealthy, for he knew Mrs. Money was rich, and that Lucy would be an heiress; and yet he was always quite at his ease with them, and accustomed to give himself airs and to be made much of; but it occurred to him that Mr. Heron's family, friends, and familiar surroundings would probably be very different from his; and he always found himself at home in the society of women, whom he knew that he could impress and impose on by his handsome presence. Yes, he felt himself rather small in the society of this pleasant, simple, unpretending young man, who was all the time