poet, above all men, needs in the woman he shall love. Their very
culture, while it may seem to broaden, really narrows them, limits them
to a caste of mind, and, for an infinite suggestiveness, substitutes a
few finite accomplishments.

Critics without understanding have wondered now and again at attachments
such as that of Heine for his Mathilde. Yet in some ways Mathilde was
the type of wife best suited for a poet. She was just a wondering child,
a bit of unspoiled chaos. She meant as little intellectually, and as
much spiritually, as a wave of the sea, a bird of the air, a star in
the sky.

Another great poet always kept in his room a growing plant in a big tub
of earth, and another tub full of fresh water. With the fire going, he
used to say that he had the four elements within his four walls; and to
people unaccustomed to talk with the elements these no doubt seemed dull
and even remarkable companions,--like Heine's Mathilde.

Now Angel, though far more than a goose intellectually, having, indeed,
a very keen and subtle mind, was only secondarily intellectual, being
primarily something far more important. You no more asked of her to be
intellectual, than you expect a spirit to be mathematical. She was just
a dream-child, thrilling with wonder and love before the strange world
in which she had been mysteriously placed,--a dream-child and an
excellent housewife in one, as full of common-sense on the one hand, as
she was filled with fairy "nonsense" on the other. She was just, in
fact, the wife for a poet.

The interest taken in each other by Angel and the Man in Possession had
not been unobserved by Angel's family. Her sisters had teased her