He was not an ordinary lover, he was not an ordinary man. He was a visionary, a poet, a dreamer, with a genius for planning great works and achieving none. He was full of ideas, vague, beautiful ideas which remained abstract, but never took concrete form. He would conceive lovely lyrics, imagine glorious epics, dream splendid dramas—and write a few columns for the newspapers. He was always going to do something, but time went by, and he did nothing, that is, nothing worthy of his undoubted abilities. He started life with brilliant promise, and probably had he known Miss Strongith’will in the days of his promise, he might have given the world something to remember, but he was naturally indolent and terribly sensitive, he hated the actual labour of writing, and the process of materialising his imagination, of reducing his ideas to words, destroyed their charm for him. He would revel in a fancy, but he could never satisfy himself in giving it form and expression, and he would not expose to unsympathetic criticism his dreams and fancies in forms which did not fully realise them. Thus he was frittering away his time, his opportunities, and such talents as were his when he met Miss Strongith’will. He had just written enough in his time to reveal latent possibilities of literary achievement, and his poetic temperament appealed to her imagination. It touched her sentimentally as she had never been touched before, at the same time that it stirred her intellectually. She felt that here was a man with talent, but without the requisite impulse of industry; what if she should make him achieve something noble and endurable? Like Keats, he declared himself for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts. She would try and help him to combine both sensation and thought, with the result that he should produce poems worthy to live. His intellectual inertness should be corrected by her strength of mind. He should yet be great through her sympathy, her aid, her love. For she loved him; his very frailty of temperament, his acute sensitiveness, his lack of self-reliance, all appealed to her strong nature, and she gave him that love which is all the deeper because it feels bound to protect its object. But his imagination was not satisfied by love of this order, it was not sufficiently romantic, his temperament needed passionate response rather than intellectual aid. She loved him entirely in her womanly way, and according to the utmost possibilities of her nature, in which, however the intellectual element dominated the emotional, whereas in her lover’s nature it was the reverse. So, while he grew impatient and weary, she began to realise a sense of disappointment.