“Perhaps. It was only an idea, and I’m not sure that it wouldn’t be a very good thing for Cecil. Don’t you think he wants an incentive?”
She nodded. “D’you know, I found something in a book the other day that made me think of Ces? I want to show it to you. I don’t like good poetry as a rule, you know, like Browning and all that. I never can understand it. But this came home to me, somehow, like something I’d always known but hadn’t ever thought about properly. A sort of recognizing.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to fetch it.” She paused for a moment and then said pleadingly: “Perhaps you’ll be able to say that it’s not true. I hope you will. I daresay I didn’t really understand half of it.”
But as he read the page that she put before him, Lucian marvelled only at her having understood so well.
NEURASTHENIA.[1]
Curs’d from the cradle and awry they come,
Masking their torment from a world at ease;
On eyes of dark entreaty, vague and dumb,
They bear the stigma of their souls’ disease.