‘O, the Poet?’ she replied. ‘That is un altro paio di maniche,—you see my devoted subdeacon is teaching me the proverbs of his lovely language,—for he abides in a lofty ether whither I fear my shafts would never reach him. For anything I can tell, he may be writing an adorable sonnet when he is tapping the top of an egg-shell at the breakfast table; and I often suspect he is, in reality, in a fine frenzy, when he appears to be listening deferentially to one of my shallowest disquisitions.’
‘Would you marry a poet?’ I asked. I should have half liked to make the inquiry more definite; but for that I had not the courage.
‘Marry a poet!’ she exclaimed, ‘I should think not indeed. Poor Veronica! She manages tolerably well with hers, thanks to her good sense and infinite patience; and perhaps she is not as sorely tried as she deserves to be for the irreparable experiment to which she has committed herself. For us women marriage is necessarily the chief mercantile transaction of our lives; and, if one marries a peer, one becomes a peeress; if one weds a millionaire, one may hope to be a million-heiress. But the wife of a poet does not become a poetess. She cannot share with him his only valuable asset; and the supposed romantic nature of his disposition, which is usually a sheer fiction, not unoften diverts from her the curiosity to which every woman is entitled, and which every woman who marries reasonably invariably gets.’
‘But if you happen to love a poet?’ I persisted.
She quickly made me repent my question. ‘You are unteachable. Love is a terminable annuity, that ends long before death, leaving one’s declining days to abject poverty.‘
At this juncture I saw Veronica and the Poet coming along the rose pergola, for January roses were pretty abundant with us, and I inwardly wished they had come sooner, for Lamia would not have dared to say such things in their presence; reserving, as she seems to do, her most outrageous utterances for my private benefit. But then, it is true, I should not in that case have put my useless interrogatories.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘I am going to burn some incense before the Poet.’
‘You know he loathes it,’ I observed.
‘Do you think I should proffer it so liberally if he liked it? We were talking,’ she said, addressing him, as he joined us, ‘of how we are to occupy ourselves in the quiet and unexciting quarters Veronica has provided for us. You, of course, can write a long poem, and I should think this is just the place for doing so, though I observe that people nowadays deprecate the writing of long poems as being out of date.’
‘I trust,’ he replied, ‘that will have no influence on their being written or not being written. Novel reading, I fear, has proved somewhat injurious to the more serious side of the imagination, and prose fiction has created a distaste for sustained works in verse. If Milton lived to-day, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso would perhaps still be more or less appreciated; but Paradise Lost would of a certainty be condemned as tedious. Even in his own day it had only fit audience but few, and few are always enough, if fit.‘