"What did the other do? You be judge!
Look at us, Edith! Here are we both!
Give him his six whole years: I grudge
None of the life with you, nay, loathe
Myself that I grudged his start in advance
Of me who could overtake and pass.
But, as if he loved you! No, not he,
Nor anyone else in the world, 'tis plain" . . .
—for he who speaks, though he so loved and loves her, knows that he is and was alone in his worship. He knows even that such worship of her was among unaccountable things. That he, young, prosperous, sane, and free, as he was and is, should have poured his life out, as it were, and held it forth to her, and said, "Half a glance, and I drop the glass!" . . . For—and now we come to those amazing stanzas which place this passionate love-song by itself in the world—
"Handsome, were you? 'Tis more than they held,
More than they said; I was 'ware and watched:
* * * * *
The others? No head that was turned, no heart
Broken, my lady, assure yourself!"
Her admirers had quickly recovered: one married a dancer, others stole a friend's wife, or stagnated or maundered, or else, unmarried, strove to believe that the peace of singleness was peace, and not—what they were finding it! But whatever these rejected suitors did, the truth about her was simply that
"On the whole, you were let alone, I think."
And laid so, on the shelf, she had "looked to the other, who acquiesced." He was a poet, was he not?
"He rhymed you his rubbish nobody read,
Loved you and doved you—did not I laugh?"
Oh, what a prize! Had she appreciated adequately her pink of poets? . . . But, after all, she had chosen him, before this lover: they had both been tried.