You might love her for a long time or a little, but love her you were obliged to while you were with her, whoever else you loved too.  There was no other word for it.  Even little James Whalley had conscience-pangs as he looked at Isabel, for he had been engaged for five years; but the poet’s heart, that is, all the combustible portion of it, was already burnt to a cinder.  Poets’ hearts, however, are used to burning.  The inflammable air of sighs about them is ever in a perpetual state of ignition; so it has come, no doubt, from long custom, that nature has made them at their centre as fireproof as the phoenix.  Otherwise, indeed, the poetic life would be impossible to live; poets could not go on maintaining the deadly fire of love, to which it is one of the conditions of their precarious art that they must daily expose themselves.  Sometimes, indeed, as we know, even these firemen of the emotions dare the burning house once too often, and we hear their death-song amid the flames.

Theophil?

Well, we can talk of Theophil again.  Meanwhile Jenny was as much in love with her herself, and he held Jenny’s hand and loved her, O yes, so dearly—­and was quite safe.  Fear not, little Jenny; it was only death, you remember, that was to separate Jenny and Theophil.

Mrs. Talbot—­if she won’t bore you—­had made an interesting remark.  She had not escaped Isabel’s charm, but there was “something,” something a little alarming about her,—­a little like that wicked wall-paper.

Jenny divulged this criticism over supper when her mother was out of ear-shot.

“How very clever of her!” exclaimed Isabel.

“She said the same of Dvorak’s music,” said Jenny.

“Good again,” said Isabel.  “How clever of her!  Don’t you feel how right she is?  We are all like that wall-paper, and everything we care about is like it.  The New Spirit—­that is, the devil—­is in that wall-paper.  A psychometrist could detect Wagner and Keats, and Schopenhauer, and Rossetti and Swinburne, and all the rest of them in that wall-paper, just as surely as he could have detected Tupper and Eliza Cook in the wall-papers of 1851.  Am I not right?”

“If we could only paper New Zion like this!” exclaimed Theophil, a curious new feeling of joy and pain shooting through him to hear a woman thus expressing herself as an independent brain.

“Yes!  New Zion!  I’d quite forgotten all about New Zion.  It seems impossible to think of you together.”

“And a little absurd, I suppose,” said Theophil.

“It is uncouth material, I admit,” he continued, “and yet somehow it amuses us to mould it all the more; and then you mustn’t forget that we had been given no other—­but I don’t suppose you can understand?” (Theophil often used “we” in this imperatorial sense, meaning himself, as of course he had every right to mean.)

“O yes, but I can,” Isabel hastened to correct.  “I understand power.”