“The girls I ‘imagine’ are always so much better than those I see,"- -he replied, with uncomplimentary candour.

“Thank you!” said Cicely—­“You are quite rude, you know!  But it doesn’t matter.”

He stared up at her in vague astonishment.

“Oh, I didn’t mean you!” he explained—­“You’re not a girl.”

“No, really!” ejaculated Cicely—­“Then what am I, pray?”

He looked at her critically,—­at her thin sallow little face with the intense eyes burning like flame under her well-marked black eyebrows,—­at her drooping angular arms and unformed figure, tapering into the scraggy, long black-stockinged legs which ended in a pair of large buckled shoes that covered feet of a decidedly flat-iron model,—­then he smiled oddly.

“You are a goblin!”—­he said—­“An elf,—­a pixie—­a witch!  You were born in a dark cave where the sea dashed in at high tide and made the rough stones roar with music.  There were sea-gulls nesting above your cradle, and when the wind howled, and you cried, they called to you wildly in such a plaintive way that you stopped your tears to listen to them, and to watch their white wings circling round you!  You are not a girl—­no!—­how can you be?  For when you grew a little older, the invisible people of the air took you away into a great forest, and taught you to swing yourself on the boughs of the trees, while the stars twinkled at you through the thick green leaves,—­and you heard the thrushes sing at morning and the nightingales at evening, till at last you learned the trill and warble and the little caught sob in the throat which almost breaks the heart of those who listen to it?  And so you have become what you are, and what I say you always will be—­a goblin—­a witch!—­not a girl, but a genius!”

He waved his hand with fantastic gesture and raked up his hair.

“That’s all very well and very pretty,”—­said Cicely, showing her even white teeth in a flashing ‘goblin’ grin,—­“But of course you don’t mean a word of it!  It’s merely a way of talking, such as poets, or men that call themselves poets, affect when the ‘fit’ is on them.  Just a string of words,—­mere babble!  You’d better write them down, though,—­you musn’t waste them!  Publishers pay for so many words I believe, whether they’re sense or nonsense,—­please don’t lose any halfpence on my account!  Do you know you are smiling up at the sky as if you were entirely mad?  Ordinary people would say you were,—­people to whom dinner is the dearest thing in life would suggest your being locked up.  And me, too, I daresay!  You haven’t answered my question,—­why don’t you write something about Maryillia?”

“She, too, is not a girl,”—­rejoined Adderley—­“She is a woman.  And she is absolutely unwritable!”

“Too lovely to find expression even in poetry,”—­said Cicely, complacently.