The words sent a keen pang through Blanchet's heart. His new acquaintance, whom Blanchet assumed to be confoundedly wealthy, evidently regarded him as a person equally favored by fortune, and therefore only writing poetry to indulge the whim of his genius. Herbert Blanchet had heard from the Money women, in a vague sort of way, that Mr. Heron had been a governor of some place; it might have been Canada or India for aught he knew to the contrary; and he assumed that he must be a very aristocratic and self-conceited person. Blanchet would not for the world have admitted at that moment that he was poor; and he shuddered at the idea that Heron might somehow learn all about Mary Blanchet's official position in the court-house of Duke's Keeton. For all the dignity of poetry and high art, Mr. Blanchet was impressed with a painful consciousness of being small somehow in the company of Mr. Heron. It was not merely because he supposed Heron to be wealthy, for he knew Mrs. Money was rich, and that Lucy would be an heiress; and yet he was always quite at his ease with them, and accustomed to give himself airs and to be made much of; but it occurred to him that Mr. Heron's family, friends, and familiar surroundings would probably be very different from his; and he always found himself at home in the society of women, whom he knew that he could impress and impose on by his handsome presence. Yes, he felt himself rather small in the society of this pleasant, simple, unpretending young man, who was all the time looking up to him as a poet and a child of genius.
Greatly pleased was the poet and child of genius when Victor Heron asked him to come into his rooms and smoke a cigar before going to bed.
"You don't sleep much or keep early hours, I dare say, Mr. Blanchet; literary men don't, I suppose; and I only sleep when I can't help it. Let us smoke and have a talk for an hour or two."
"Night is my day," said Blanchet. "I don't think people who have minds can talk well in the hours before midnight. When I have to work in the day I sometimes close my shutters, light my gas, and fancy I am under the influences of night."
"I got the way of sitting up half the night," said Victor simply, "from living in places where one had best sleep in the day; but I am sure if I were a poet, I should delight in the night for its own sake."