“And have you seen the last Illustrated?” she asked, after awhile, with a burst of enthusiasm. “It’s on the table in the salon there. And there are three, oh, such lovely, lovely stanzas in it,—‘Among Alps,’ by Will Deverill.”
Her words sent a thrill of pleasure through Will’s modest soul. He had published but little, and ’twas seldom he heard his own name thus familiarly unhandled. Still, a harassing doubt possessed his soul. Could the Vision of Beauty have seen his name in the visitors’ book of the hotel, noticed the coincidence with the lines in the Illustrated, which he had sent from the Zillerthal, and managed this little coup with feminine adroitness, on purpose to deceive him? Yet she didn’t look guileful. With poetic trustfulness, he cast the evil suggestion at once behind him. “I’m so glad you liked them,” he said, timidly, looking down at his plate, and playing in nervous jerks with his fork in the chicken. “I wrote them in the Tyrol here. They’re fresh-fed from the glaciers.”
The Vision laid down her knife and fork and stared at him, speechless. “You’re not Will Deverill,” she exclaimed, in some excitement, after a moment’s pause.
“That’s my name,” Will answered, somewhat abashed, still perusing his plate. “But I’m very little used to—to—to meeting people who have heard of it.”
The pretty American clasped her hands with delight “Well, I am glad to meet you,” she said, “though I’d have given you the benefit of the Mr, of course, if I’d known it was you. I just love your verses. I have ‘Voices from the Hills’ in my box upstairs, bound in calf, this minute.”
“No; not really?” Will cried, with a young author’s delight at unexpected recognition.
“I’ll go upstairs after dinner and fetch it down to show you,” his pretty admirer answered, with some pride. “And your friend, too, is he a poet?”
“In soul; in soul only!” Florian interposed, airily, dashing in at a tangent; for it irked him thus to play second fiddle to Will’s first hand, and he longed to assert his “proper position.” “I string no sonnets; I play no harmonies; I take the higher place. I sit on a critical throne, weighing and appraising all arts impartially. Deverill rhymes; another man paints; a third man strums; a fourth acts, or carves stone—and all for me. I exercise none of these base handicrafts myself; but I live supreme in the Palace of Art they build, subordinating each in due place to my soul’s delight, like a subtle architect.”
“Just the same as all the rest of us,” the pretty American put in, interrupting his period. “We all do that. We sit still and listen. The difficulty is—to produce, like Mr Deverill.”
Florian stood aghast. To think a mere woman should thus slight his pretensions! But the pretty American, disregarding him, turned to Will once more. “And your friend’s name?” she said, interrogatively.