III.
He put down his scratching pen and was leaning back in his chair, looking at her.
She wondered what he was thinking. Sometimes the space of the room was enormous between her table by the first tall window and his by the third; sometimes it shrank and brought them close. It was bringing them close now.
"You can't see the text for the footnotes," she said. "The notes must go in the Appendix."
She wanted to make herself forget that all her own things, the things she had saved from the last burning, were lying there on his table, staring at her. She was trying not to look that way, not to let herself imagine for a moment that he had read them.
"Never mind the notes and the Appendix."
He had got up. He was leaning now against the tall shutter of her window, looking down at her.
"Why didn't you tell me? Before I let you in for that horrible drudgery? All that typing and indexing—If I'd only known you were doing anything like this…. Why couldn't you have told me?"
"Because I wasn't doing it. It was done ages ago."
"It's my fault. I ought to have known. I did know there was something. I ought to have attended to it and found out what it was."
He began walking up and down the room, turning on her again and again, making himself more and more excited.
"That translation of the Bacchae—what made you think of doing it like that?"
"I'd been reading Walt Whitman—It showed me you could do without rhyme. I knew it must sound as if it was all spoken—chanted—that they mustn't sing. Then I thought perhaps that was the way to do it."
"Yes. Yes. It is the way to do it. The only way…. You see, that's what my Euripides book's about. The very thing I've been trying to ram down people's throats, for years. And all the time you were doing it—down here—all by yourself—for fun … I wish I'd known … What are you going to do about it?"
"I didn't think anything could be done."
He sat down to consider that part of it.
* * * * *
He was going to get it published for her.
He was going to write the Introduction.
"And—the other things?"
"Oh, well, that's another matter. There's not much of it that'll stand."
He knew. He would never say more or less than he meant.
Not much of it that would stand. Now that she knew, it was extraordinary how little she minded.
"Still, there are a few things. They must come out first. In the spring. Then the Bacchae in the autumn. I want it to be clear from the start that you're a poet translating; not the other way on."
He walked home with her, discussing gravely how it would be done.