and say he is poking fun at me. But Silverplume is quite serious—I am sure of that, and it is the worst feature of the case. He carries on just the same in conversation, with the most improper allusions to heathen goddesses, and seems really to believe that I am absorbed in the sunset when I am thinking what to wear to-morrow. Just to give you an idea of how he misinterprets my silence let me read to you one of his sonnets called:
"'MOONSHINE.
"'Walking a space betwixt the double Naught,
The What Is Bound to Be and What Has Been,
How sweet with Thee beneath the moonlit treen,
O woman-soul immaculately wrought,
To sit and catch a harmony uncaught
Within a world that mocks with margarine,
In chastened silence, mystic, epicene,
Exchanging incommunicable thought.
"'Diana, Death may doom and Time may toss,
And sundry other kindred things occur,
But Hell itself can never turn to loss,
Though Mephistopheles his stumps should stir,
That day, when introduced at Charing Cross,
I smiled and doffed my silken cylinder.'
"Another distressing feature about Silverplume—indeed, I think about all men—is their continuous capacity for love-making. You know, my dear Miss Dulcimer, with us it is a matter of times and seasons—we are creatures of strange and subtle susceptibilities, sometimes we are in the mood for love and ready to respond to all shades of sentimentality, but at other moments (and these the majority) men's amorous advances jar horribly. Men do not know this. Ever ready to make love themselves they think all moments are the same to us as to them. And of all men, poets are the most prepared to make love at a moment's notice. So that Silverplume himself is almost more trying than his verses."
"But after all you need not read them," observed Lillie. "They please him and they do not hurt you. And you have always the consolation of remembering it is not you he loves but the paragon he has evolved from his inner consciousness. Even taking into account his perennial affectionateness, your reason for refusing him seems scarcely strong enough."
"Ah, wait a moment—You have not heard the worst! I might perhaps have tolerated his metrical misinterpretations—indeed on my sending him a vigorous protest against the inaccuracies of his last collection (they came out so much more glaringly when brought all together from the various scattered publications to which Silverplume originally contributed them) he sent me back a semi-apologetic explanation thus conceived:
"'TO CELIA.'
"(You know of course my name is Diana, but that is his way.)
"''Tis not alone thy sweet eyes' gleam
Nor sunny glances,
For which I weave so oft a dream
Of dainty fancies.