"I have the honour to congratulate you. And what a man you have got!"
So they chatted, and soon came to the subject of their prospects. He dictated and she wrote. Such and such plays of his accepted for the stage.... That would be a thousand pounds.
"Discount thirty per cent for disappointments," she said.
"Thirty! I also reckon ninety or a hundred per cent."
"Be sober! It is serious." And then they laughed.
Divine frivolity! To look down on the ugly earnestness of life as if all one had to do was to blow at it. The poet's light-hearted way of treating economy like poetry.
"How could one bear the miseries of life, if one did not treat them as unrealities? If I took it seriously, I should have to weep the whole day, and I don't want to do that."
Dinner-time came; she laid the sofa-table, fed him, and was especially sparing with the wine.
"You have drunk enough now, and you must promise never to go to the café again, especially with Thais."
"Lais," he corrected her, but coloured. "You know that then?"