"You couldn't be that," said my husband, "not even when it comes to my new book."
"Very pretty," observed Wright, regarding us both, impartially.
"Isn't she?"
This was too much. I turned the conversation in the direction of our coming dinner party and to a discussion of hibiscus-bloom. But all through that afternoon through the banter, the sparkling surface talk, of dinner that night, through the hours before I fell asleep, I was trying to adjust myself to the fact that it was, after all, Bill who had written The Lyric Hour; who had so beautifully said so many true and lovely things: who was a very high-hearted poet.
No matter how little of his real self he had shown me in his letters, regardless of the obvious misfit of his poems and his living personality, he had written those poems: they were his. And they must have sprung from some eternal and true fount of beauty in his nature, or else all books lied and all the poets who ever lived to gladden the world with their songs were tricksters and jesters, with a command of rythmical English and no more. I could not believe that. And so, I must believe that my husband had written truly and sung faithfully, from his heart. And that is what I could not understand, could not reconcile with him, himself. He had hurt me, had wounded my pride beyond endurance: I hated him, I wished myself free of his mere presence: but I was, in the last analysis, forced to admit his genius, and forced to acknowledge his power. Richard Warren had never existed, not the Richard Warren I had built up from a slender volume of verse and a drawer-full of letters. But William Denton did exist, very solidly, and for me, distastefully. And William Denton had written The Lyric Hour.
It may not be difficult, given certain conditions, to hate a poet, but it seemed too bad.
The following night our very informal dinner took place. We had asked some other people, to make up a party of ten, and so we had quite a formidable array of "valor and beauty" around the long, refectory table. Mr. and Mrs. Howells and their daughter, the Chinese Minister and his wife, Bobby Willard and his sister Ruth, Wright, Bill and myself, all rather diplomatically placed, made up the group. It was a rather amusing, and incidentally, an excellent meal. Over the massed orchids on the table, I could see Wright almost feverishly attentive alternately, to Ruth Willard in pale-blue on his left, and to Mercedes, in an amazing frock of black lace, a cluster of orange flowers at her girdle, seated between him and my husband. At my end of the table I had Mr. Howells and the courteous gentleman from the Orient. And Mrs. Howells, at Bill's right, watched indolently her daughter's radiant progress and applied herself, mutely, to the business of eating. In consequence, Mercedes, during the greater part of the meal, drove tandem; and it was really pretty to watch—only, by the salad course, it had grown monotonous.
After dinner we had two tables of bridge. Fortunately, I played rather a good game, Father having taught me patiently, in order to provide one more time-killer, during my shut-inism. As we were ten, two were left to play the piano, to sit out on the verandah, to stroll about the grounds. I had cleverly manoeuvered that Wright and Ruth be left, but something went wrong, and Bill, announcing that he did not care to play, was joined by Mercedes, who insisted that the only rule she knew was "not to trump her partner's ace." I fancied, however, that she was well equipped with the finesse instinct.
"And even that I often forget," she said, laughing. "Me, I have so little use for rules!"
So it eventually and naturally came about that Bill and Mercedes stayed out of the game, joined now and then by whoever was dummy.