The thought clung to him. He rose and laid out heaps of muddled manuscript—opera disjecta—and turned their pages.
"Yes—yes—give us life!" they seemed to cry to him. "We are dead drops of ink, wake us to life and beauty. How much longer are we to lie here, dusty in death? We have waited so patiently—have pity on us, raise us up from our silent tomb, and we will fly abroad through the whole earth, chanting your glory; yea, the world shall be filled to eternity with the echoes of our music and the splendour of your name."
But he shook his head and sighed, and put them back in their niches, and placed the comic opera he had begun in the centre of the table.
"There lie the only dollars that will ever come my way," he said aloud. And, humming the opening bars of a lively polka from the manuscript, he took up his pen and added a few notes. Then he paused; the polka would not come—the other voice was louder.
"It would be a degradation," he repeated, to silence it. "It would be merely for her money. I don't love her."
"Are you so sure of that?"
"If I really loved her I shouldn't refuse to marry her."
"Are you so sure of that?"
"What's the use of all this wire-drawing?—the whole thing is impossible."
"Why is it impossible?"