“I should say that Wordsworth was that, more properly.” “I hate Wordsworth!” she answered, with vigour and truth, “and as for Shelley, I should call him the poet of physical geography!” He laughed. “You don’t care for atmospheric effects in poetry, I see. You prefer Keats.” “Yes, I do. And as for putting on his tombstone that his name was to be writ in water, I think that would have suited Shelley far better. Keats’ name should have been written in blood--he was passionate.... Shall I try to sing something to you.” Her singing was nothing wonderful, but sweet and sympathetic and never out of tune. All her gifts were natural, she had always been too restless to apply herself to any but that of pose, which she had brought to so high a pitch of perfection. But the songs which she sang were the kind of songs that Rivers seemed to like, for his brown eyes grew soft and limpid and his face looked less set and more open as he listened. For this parity in their likings she had to thank her husband, who, in the days when she had cared to please him, had insisted on her cultivating an acquaintance with the simple national airs of all countries that he could join in. She felt, somehow, that a little French repertory she had would not be appropriate just now and refrained from producing it. She sang on until the sound of shutters closing and the tramp of heavy-booted men--the landlady’s two stalwart sons--trooping up to their beds in the attics, warned them of the lateness of the hour according to country canons. “If you do care at all for my songs,” she asked, deprecatingly, as he lit her candle for her at the foot of the stairs, “may I come and play for you again another evening?” Her glance--both their glances, as she spoke, were irresistibly directed to that scene of havoc and disaster, the meeting-room, whose open door confronted them. It was swept and cleared now of the litter of the tea, and freshly sanded, but still as dreary and comfortless an abiding place as could well be imagined. “You had better use my sitting-room in future--that is, if you will. That barrack of a room is not fit for anyone to inhabit. But you will not mind my working as usual, and then, I am afraid I get so absorbed that I cannot talk, or even be ordinarily civil!” “Oh, may I really?” she cried. “I assure you I shall be quite happy sitting--beside you,” she was going to say, but corrected it into “with my book!” Though where the literature was to come from that was to keep her quiet was more than she knew. Excepting the Shelley, Taine’s “Historie de l’Esthétique Anglaise” was quite the lightest work on Rivers’ mantelpiece, and she had had, of course, no books among her luggage. “Very well, then, we will look upon that as settled,” he said, shortly, and held out his hand again to say good-night. “I will come in in the evenings, if you will let me, when it really is melancholy in that big meeting-room, but during the day---- ”