"Do you think poetry and common sense necessarily opposed to each
other?" asked Wingfold.

"I confess a leaning to that opinion," replied Bascombe, with a
half-conscious smile.

"What do you say of Horace, now?" suggested Wingfold.

"Unfortunately for me, you have mentioned the one poet for whom I
have any respect. But what I like in him is just his common sense.
He never cries over spilt milk, even if the jug be broken to the
bargain. But common sense would be just as good in prose as in
verse."

"Possibly; but what we have of it in Horace would never have reached
us but for the forms into which he has cast it. How much more
enticing acorns in the cup are! I was watching two children picking
them up to-day."

"That may be; there have always been more children than grown men,"
returned Bascombe. "For my part, I would sweep away all illusions,
and get at the heart of the affair."

"But," said Wingfold, with the look of one who, as he tries to say
it, is seeing a thing for the first time, "does not the acorn-cup
belong to the acorn? May not some of what you call illusions, be the
finer, or at least more ethereal qualities of the thing itself? You
do not object to music in church, for instance?"

Bascombe was on the point of saying he objected to it nowhere except