"It's astonishing, Frank, how well you know him, and yet you deny his intimacy with Pembroke. To you he is a living man; you always talk of him as if he had just gone out of the room, and yet you persist in believing in his innocence."
"You misapprehend me," I said, "the passion of his life was for Mary Fitton, to give her a name; I mean the 'dark lady' of the sonnets, who was Beatrice, Cressida and Cleopatra, and you yourself admit that a man who has a mad passion for a woman is immune, I think the doctors call it, to other influences."
"Oh, yes, Frank, of course; but how could Shakespeare with his beautiful nature love a woman to that mad excess?"
"Shakespeare hadn't your overwhelming love of plastic beauty," I replied; "he fell in love with a dominant personality, the complement of his own yielding, amiable disposition."
"That's it," he broke in, "our opposites attract us irresistibly—the charm of the unknown!"
"You often talk now," I went on, "as if you had never loved a woman; yet you must have loved—more than one."
"My salad days, Frank," he quoted, smiling, "when I was green in judgment, cold of blood."
"No, no," I persisted, "it is not a great while since you praised Lady So and So and the Terrys enthusiastically."
"Lady ——," he began gravely (and I could not but notice that the mere title seduced him to conventional, poetic language), "moves like a lily in water; I always think of her as a lily; just as I used to think of Lily Langtry as a tulip, with a figure like a Greek vase carved in ivory. But I always adored the Terrys: Marion is a great actress with subtle charm and enigmatic fascination: she was my 'Woman of no importance,' artificial and enthralling; she belongs to my theatre—"
As he seemed to have lost the thread, I questioned again.