by dint of argument; but you will find how little is ever done in the world by close reasoning”:  and, turning to his wife in a pet, “I profess, sweetheart, I think our Jack would not attend to the most pressing necessities of nature unless he could give a reason for it.”  To Hetty, on the other hand, beauty—­beauty in language, in music, in all forms of art, no less than the beauty of a spring day—­ was an ultimate thing and lay beyond questions:  and Mr. Wesley, though as a divine he checked her somewhat pagan impulses and recalled them to give account of their ground of choice, as a scholar could not help admiring them.  For they seldom led her to choose wrongly.  In Hetty dwelt something of the Attic instinct which, in days of literary artifice and literary fashions from which she could not wholly escape, kept her taste fresh and guided her at once to browse on what was natural and health-giving and to reject with delicate disgust what was rank and overblown.  Himself a sardonic humorist, he could enjoy the bubbling mirth with which she discovered comedy in the objects of their common derision.  Himself a hoplite in study, laborious, without sense of proportion, he could look on and smile while she, a woman, walked more nimbly, picking and choosing as she went.

The manuscript he held was a poem of hers, scored with additions and alterations of his own, by which (though mistakenly) he believed he had improved it:  a song of praise put in the mouth of a disciple of Plato:  its name, “Eupolis, his Hymn to the Creator.”  As he turned the pages, his eyes paused and fastened themselves on a passage here and there: 

     “Sole from sole Thou mak’st the sun
      On his burning axles run: 
      The stars like dust around him fly,
      And strew the area of the sky: 
      He drives so swift his race above,
      Mortals can’t perceive him move: 
      So smooth his course, oblique or straight,
      Olympus shakes not with his weight. 
      As the Queen of solemn Night
      Fills at his vase her orb of light—­
      Imparted lustre—­thus we see
      The solar virtue shines by Thee. 
      EIRESIONE! we’ll no more
      For its fancied aid implore,
      Since bright oil and wool and wine
      And life-sustaining bread are Thine;
     Wine that sprightly mirth supplies,
      Noble wine for sacrifice. . . .”

The verses, though he repeated them, had no meaning for him.  He remembered her sitting at the table by the window (now surrendered to Johnny Whitelamb) and transcribing them into a fair copy, sitting with head bent and the sunlight playing on her red-brown hair:  he remembered her standing by his chair with a flushed face, waiting for his verdict.  But though his memory retained these visions, they carried no sentiment.  He only thought of the young, almost boyish, promise in the lines: