This explosion called forth a protest from the poet's admirer. "May I ask," said Morton to his cousin, "who are your literary favorites?" "Not the latter-day poets--the Tennysonian school; their puling mannerism is an insult to the Saxon tongue." "But," urged Miss Jones, "you are not quite reasonable." "Of course I am not. It's not a woman's province to be reasonable." "Do you subscribe to these poetical heresies, Mr. Morton?" "On the contrary, I think that Tennyson has often great beauties." "If he sometimes wrote like an angel," pursued Fanny Euston, "I should find no patience to see it in a man who could put upon paper such parrot rhymes as these:-- 'Not a whit of thy tuwhoo, Thee to woo to thy tuwhit, Thee to woo to thy tuwhit, With a lengthened loud halloo, Tuwhoo, tuwhit, tuwhit, tuwhoo-o-o!' Bah! it puts one in a passion to hear such twaddle." "I see," said her friend, "that nothing less than your own music will calm your indignation. Pray let us hear the ballad which you set to music this morning." "I will sing, if you wish it; but not that ballad." And she seated herself before the open piano. "What do you choose, Mr. Morton?" "The Marseillaise. That, I think, is in your vein." "Ah! you can choose well!" And, running her fingers over the keys, she launched at once into the warlike strains of the hymn of revolution. Her voice and execution were admirable; and though by no means unconscious that she was producing an effect, she sang with a fire, energy, and seeming recklessness that thrilled like lightning through her auditor's veins. He rose involuntarily from his seat. For that evening his study of character was ended, and philosophy dislodged from her last stronghold. Half an hour later he was riding homeward in a mood quite novel to his experience. He pushed his horse to a keen trot, as if by fierceness of motion to keep pace with the fiery influence that was kindling all his nerves. "I have had my fancies before this," he thought,--"in fact I have almost been in love; but that feeling was no more like this than a draught from a clear spring is like a draught of spiced wine." That night he fully expected to be haunted by a vision of Fanny Euston; but his slumbers were unromantically dreamless.