There was that in De Mauleon's talk hostile to all which we call romance
that excited the imagination of Isaura, and compelled her instinctive
love for whatever is more sweet, more beautiful, more ennobling on the
many sides of human life, to oppose what she deemed the paradoxes of a
man who had taught himself to belie even his own nature. She became
eloquent, and her countenance, which in ordinary moments owed much of its
beauty to an expression of meditative gentleness, was now lighted up by
the energy of earnest conviction--the enthusiasm of an impassioned zeal.

Gradually De Mauleon relaxed his share in the dialogue, and listened to
her, rapt and dreamily as in his fiery youth he had listened to the songs
of the sirens. No siren Isaura! She was defending her own cause, though
unconsciously--defending the vocation of art as the embellisher of
external nature, and more than embellisher of the nature which dwells
crude, but plastic in the soul of man: indeed therein the creator of a
new nature, strengthened, expanded, and brightened in proportion as it
accumulates the ideas that tend beyond the boundaries of the visible and
material nature, which is finite; for ever seeking in the unseen and the
spiritual the goals in the infinite which it is their instinct to divine.
"That which you contemptuously call romance," said Isaura, "is not
essential only to poets and artists. The most real side of every life,
from the earliest dawn of mind in the infant, is the romantic."

"When the child is weaving flower-chains, chasing butterflies, or sitting
apart and dreaming what it will do in the future, is not that the child's
real life, and yet is it not also the romantic?"

"But there comes a time when we weave no flower-chains, and chase no
butterflies."