He knew that Barbara did not make these things; it only seemed as if she made them because she was the better joy of them: did not the fact show how the fiction of a God might have sprung up in the minds that had no Barbara to look like the maker of the loveliness? But Barbara was there already, known and loved. The mind did not invent Barbara. And again, why should the mind want anyone to look like a maker, an indweller, an _ingeniuer_--to use a word of Shakespeare's invention? Yet again, why should the thought of Barbara _suggest_ a soul, that is, a causing, informing presence, to these things? Was there a meaning in them? How did they come to have that meaning? Could it be that, having come out of nothing--the mind of man, and all the things, out of the same nothing, they responded enough to each other for the man to find his own reflex wherever he pleased to look for it? Only, if man and Nature came both out of nothing, why should they not be nothing to each other? why should not man be nothing to himself? As it was, one nothing, having no thought, meant the same the other nothing meant, having thought!--and hence came all the beauty of the world! And once again, if these things meant nothing but what the mind put into them--its own thought, namely, of them--they did not really mean anything, they were only imagined to mean it; and why should he, if but for a moment, imagine Barbara at the root of nothing? And why should he not, seeing she was herself nothing? Or was he to consent to be fooled, and act as if there was something where he knew there was nothing? The truth of Richard's love appeared in this that he was more able now to see the other side of a thing, to start objection to his own idea from the side of one who thought differently. “If I feel,” he would say to himself, “as if these things meant something, and conclude that they only mean _me,_ being the body to me, who am the soul of them; and still more if I conclude that the sum of them is the blind cause of me; then, when I grow sick of myself, finding no comfort, no stay in myself for myself, and know that I need another, say _another self,_ then the seeming sympathy that Nature offers me, is the merest mockery! It is only my own self--myself gone behind and peeping round a corner, grinning back sympathy at me from its sickening death-mask! Why should man need another if he came from nothing? But he came from a father and mother: man needed the woman: will not that explain the thing? No; for even the relation itself needs to be comforted and sustained and defended!”