It would have been difficult to judge from her accents whether she
were afraid to broach her own matter, or really interested in his.
Or a certain youthful pride that he evidenced at being the
elucidator of such a large theme, and at having drawn her there to
hear and observe it, may have inclined her to indulge him for
kindness' sake.

Thereupon he took exception to her use of the word 'grand' as
descriptive of the actual universe:

'The imaginary picture of the sky as the concavity of a dome whose
base extends from horizon to horizon of our earth is grand, simply
grand, and I wish I had never got beyond looking at it in that way.
But the actual sky is a horror.'

'A new view of our old friends, the stars,' she said, smiling up at
them.

'But such an obviously true one!' said the young man. 'You would
hardly think, at first, that horrid monsters lie up there waiting to
be discovered by any moderately penetrating mind--monsters to which
those of the oceans bear no sort of comparison.'

'What monsters may they be?'

'Impersonal monsters, namely, Immensities. Until a person has
thought out the stars and their inter-spaces, he has hardly learnt
that there are things much more terrible than monsters of shape,
namely, monsters of magnitude without known shape. Such monsters