always angry with people who do not say just
what I like. But I hope I am not given to think ill of them. In the end I am
usually obliged to think ill of myself, for being so impatient.«
    »Still, you don't like me; I have made myself an unpleasant thought to you.«
    »Not at all,« said Dorothea, with the most open kindness. »I like you very
much.«
    Will was not quite contented, thinking that he would apparently have been of
more importance if he had been disliked. He said nothing, but looked dull, not
to say sulky.
    »And I am quite interested to see what you will do,« Dorothea went on
cheerfully. »I believe devoutly in a natural difference of vocation. If it were
not for that belief, I suppose I should be very narrow - there are so many
things, besides painting, that I am quite ignorant of. You would hardly believe
how little I have taken in of music and literature, which you know so much of. I
wonder what your vocation will turn out to be: perhaps you will be a poet?«
    »That depends. To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no
shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a
hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion - a soul in
which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as
a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.«
    »But you leave out the poems,« said Dorothea. »I think they are wanted to
complete the poet. I understand what you mean about knowledge passing into
feeling, for that seems to be just what I experience. But I am sure I could
never produce a poem.«
    »You are a poem - and that is to be the best part of a poet - what makes up
the poet's consciousness in his best moods,« said Will, showing such originality
as we all share with the morning and the spring-time and other endless renewals.
    »I am very glad to hear it,« said Dorothea, laughing out her words in a
birdlike modulation, and looking at Will with playful gratitude in her eyes.
»What very kind things you say to me!«
    »I wish I could ever do anything that would be what you call kind - that I
could ever be of the slightest service to you. I fear I shall never have the
opportunity.«