Lily paused and looked half shyly, half archly, at Kenelm, then added,
in slow, deep-drawn tones--"given a glimpse of her innermost self?"

"Innermost self!" repeated Mrs. Cameron, perplexed and laughing
gently.

Lily stole nearer to Kenelm and whispered,--

"Is not one's innermost self one's best self?"

Kenelm smiled approvingly. The fairy was rapidly deepening her spell
upon him. If Lily had been his sister, his betrothed, his wife, how
fondly he would have kissed her! She had expressed a thought over
which he had often inaudibly brooded, and she had clothed it with all
the charm of her own infantine fancy and womanlike tenderness. Goethe
has said somewhere, or is reported to have said, "There is something
in every man's heart, that, if you knew it, would make you hate him."
What Goethe said, still more what Goethe is reported to have said, is
never to be taken quite literally. No comprehensive genius--genius at
once poet and thinker--ever can be so taken. The sun shines on a
dunghill. But the sun has no predilection for a dunghill. It only
comprehends a dunghill as it does a rose. Still Kenelm had always
regarded that loose ray from Goethe's prodigal orb with an abhorrence
most unphilosophical for a philosopher so young as generally to take
upon oath any words of so great a master. Kenelm thought that the
root of all private benevolence, of all enlightened advance in social
reform, lay in the adverse theorem,--that in every man's nature there
lies a something that, could we get at it, cleanse it, polish it,
render it visibly clear to our eyes, would make us love him. And in