measure the best things in life by their financial
returns? Considered as a human experience, a fresh and charming
adventure in life, it glows yet in my memory with a glory all its own.

The effect upon Nort was curious enough. At one moment the amusing
aspects of the adventure seemed uppermost with him, and I felt that he
was laughing at all of us, using us all, using the town of Hempfield,
for his lordship's amusement; and at the next moment he seemed seriously
entangled in the meshes of his own enthusiasm. It was a time of
transition and development for Nort.

Part of his reckless spirits at this time I am sure was due to the
passage of arms with Anthy, which I have already described. He had been
curiously piqued by her attitude, and by the thought that she was
actually his employer and could discharge him. It did not correspond
with his preconceived views of life nor with his conception of the place
that women should occupy in the cosmos. Not that Nort had ever been
profoundly interested in women, not he! He had played with them, indeed,
for he had belonged to that class, sometimes called the favoured, in
which men rarely work with women, or study with them, or think with
them. While he did not try to explain his emotions to himself, he had
been disconcerted by Anthy's perfectly direct ways, by being treated
simply as a human being, a coworker, not as though he were all man and
she all woman, and nothing else mattered.

It was in this mood of exuberant amusement, combined with challenge to
Anthy, that he wrote his absurd report (which was never printed) of the
effect of the publication of the poems upon Hempfield, and read it aloud
one evening with great dramatic effect--keeping one eye on Anthy where
she sat, half in shadow, at her desk.

"Poets," wrote Nort, "were seen congratulating or commiserating one
another upon the public streets, whole families were electrified by
discovering that they had a poet in their midst without knowing it,
wives were revealed to husbands and husbands to wives, and even the
little children of Hempfield began to lisp in measures."

There was much more in the same strain, indicating that Nort was still
laughing at us, instead of with us. But Anthy sat there in the shadow,
very still, and said nothing. When in repose Anthy's face seemed often
to take on a cast of sadness, especially about the eyes, of that sadness
and sweetness which so often go with strength and nobility of spirit.