“You have never seen her—ah! Conchobar, had you seen her
With that high, laughing, turbulent head of hers
Thrown backward, and the bowstring at her ear,
Or sitting at the fire with these grave eyes
Full of good counsel as it were with wine,
Or when love ran through all the lineaments
Of her wild body....”
She drank in the lines eagerly, and when he paused she looked at him gratefully. “I’d like to do a part like that,” she said.
The cocktails came, but she pushed hers aside. “Tell me some more about her. She loves and hates the same man? Does he understand that—her lover, I mean.”
“Perhaps not at first—in my play, he wouldn’t. But in Yeats’s play, years later, he does understand. When the older king complains that even his former sweetheart makes war on him, he says: