The next day was Saturday, and he had no sitting.  The morning he spent in his small bedroom in the soothing throes of literary composition.  Some time ago he had thought it would be a mighty fine thing to be a poet, and had tried his hand at verse.  Finding he possessed some facility, he decided that he was a poet, and at once started an epic poem in rhyme on the Life of Nelson, the material being supplied by Southey.  This morning he did the Battle of the Baltic.

He put the glass to his blind eye,
And said “No signals do I spy,”

wrote Paul.  Poetry taken at the gallop like this was a very simple affair, and Paul covered an amazing amount of ground.

In the afternoon he walked abroad with Jane, who, having lengthened her skirts and put up her hair, was now a young woman looking older than her years.  She too had developed.  Her lank figure had rounded into pretty curves.  Her sharp little Cockney face had filled out.  She had a pleasant smile and a capable brow, and, correcting a tendency to fluffiness of hair of which she disapproved, and dressing herself neatly, made herself by no means unattractive.  Constant association with Paul had fired her ambitions.  Like him, she might have a destiny, though not such a majestic one, Accordingly she had studied stenography and typewriting, with a view to earning her livelihood away from the little shop, which did not offer the prospect of a dazzling career.  At the back of her girlish mind was the desire to keep pace with Paul in his upward flight, so that he should not be ashamed of her when he sat upon the clouds in glory.  In awful secrecy she practised the social accomplishments which Paul brought home.  She loved her Saturday and Sunday excursions with Paul—­of late they had gone far afield:  the Tower, Greenwich, Ricmond—­exploring London and making splendid discoveries such as Westminster Abbey and a fourpenny tea garden at Putney.  She scarcely knew whether she cared for these things for themselves; but she saw them through Paul coloured by his vivid personality.  Once on Chelsea Bridge he had pointed out a peculiarly ugly stretch of low-tide mud, and said:  “Look at that.”  She, by unprecedented chance, mistaking his tone, had replied:  “How lovely!” And she had thought it lovely, until his stare of rebuke and wonderment brought disillusion and spurting tears, which for the life of him he could not understand.  It is very foolish, and often suicidal, of men to correct women for going into rapture. over mud flats.  On that occasion, however, the only resultant harm was the conviction in the girl’s heart that the presence of Paul turned mud flats into beds of asphodel.  Then, just as she saw outer things through his eyes, she felt herself regarded by outer eyes through him.  His rare and absurd beauty made him a cynosure whithersoever he went.  London, vast and seething, could produce no such perfect Apollo.  When she caught the admiring glances of others of her