"And did you cough?"
"Violently," said Hugh.
"Upon which the fish-bone returned to your mouth?"
"No," said Hugh. "I swallowed it. It never returned at all."
"It does not matter which way it went," said Nadine; "but your feeling of pleasure at its going was dependent on the pain which its sticking gave you."
"Is that all?" said Hugh.
"Does it not seem to you to be proved?"
"Oh, yes. It was proved long ago. But it's a pedantic point. The sort of point John would have made."
He absently whistled the first two lines of "Am Stillen Herd," and Nadine was diverted from her Platonisms.
"Ah, that is so much finer than the finished 'Preislied,'" she said; "he has curled and oiled his verse like an Assyrian bull. He and Sachs had cobbled at it too much: they had brushed and combed it. It had lost something of springtime and sea-breeze. A finished work of art has necessarily less quality of suggestiveness. Look at the Leonardo drawings. Is the 'Gioconda' ever quite as suggestive? I am rather glad it was stolen. I think Leonardo is greater without it."