XXI
"We're all for love," the violins said.
Sidney Lanier.
Robin's music was a source of great delight to both of them. There was such a sense of time, infinite and unlimited, that they ceased to be the hurrying mortals of earth. The joy of life crept into their hearts, and they grew young with the new world.
One evening they watched the full moon come up over the mountains. She had been playing a few desultory airs, and looking up asked,—
"Who is it says 'music is love in search of a word'?"
"If you don't know, I'm sure I don't," answered Adam, laughing. "Do you know that you quote entirely too much?"
"Oh, yes," she said lightly. "I always knew that if I ever should break into print, the critics, supposing they ever deigned to notice me, would say, as they said of Lubbock's 'Beauties of Life,' that it wasn't a book, but a compendium of useful quotations. But do you really dislike quoting? I think it takes as much or nearly as much originality to quote well as to invent."
"Oh, no!" he interposed.
"No? Well, it seems so to me. I think the thing first myself, that is original so far as I am concerned, though it may be old as the hills, and then it comes to me afterward, in a dozen ways, perhaps, as other people have said it. I realize that in the kaleidoscope of life the pattern before my mind's eye approximates that which others have seen. We don't say a man knows too many synonyms or antonyms, and I don't see much difference."
"I have a misty memory that quotation is said to be a confession of inferiority," answered Adam.