"Perhaps Mr Lambert is a poet himself," said Hamilton-Cox, with a suspicion of a sneer, "or has written poetry."
"Poetry! yards of it," answered the accused with a mellow laugh, "when I was young and—wise. The first poem I ever wrote was all about the moon; I wrote it when I was eleven, and sent it to a housemaid. Oh, murder! but the things that we do when we are young."
"Did she read it?"
"She couldn't read; it was in the days before the Board schools and the higher education of women. She couldn't read, she was forty, and ugly as sin; and she boxed my ears and told my mother, and my mother told my father, and he leathered me. He said, 'I'll teach you to write poetry to housemaids.' But somehow," said Mr Lambert, admiring with one eye the ruby-tinted light in his glass of port, "somehow, with all his teaching, I never wrote a poem to a housemaid again."
"That must have been a loss to literature."
"Yes, but it was a gain to housemaids; and as housemaids seem the main producers of novels and poems nowadays, begad," said Mr Lambert, "it's, after all, a gain to literature."
"That's one for you, Cox," said Professor Wilson, and Hamilton-Cox laughed, as he could well afford to do, for his lucubrations brought him in a good fifteen hundred a year, and his reputation was growing.
On the lawn, under the starlit night after dinner, Bevan had his fiancée for a moment alone. They sat in creaky basket-work chairs a good yard apart from each other. The moon was rising over the hills and deep, dark woods of Sussex, the air was warm and perfumed: it was an ideal night for love-making.
"When I left you I had some dinner at the Nord," said Mr Bevan, tipping the ash off his cigar. "The worst dinner I've ever had, I think. Upon my word, I think it was the worst dinner I ever had. When I got to Dover I was so tired I turned into the hotel, and came on next morning. What sort of crossing did you have?"