Gerald shrugged. He said:
“I shall therefore be resistless. I shall compel him to restore into general circulation the Dirghic mythology, after having amply repaired whatsoever damage he may have done to it, and then I shall assume, in addition to his throne, my proper station as a culture hero and a sun deity and a Savior in that mythology. So the affair is, virtually, settled: we may now turn to other matters: and in return for the gracious aid afforded by your large wisdom, I will make in your honor a sonnet.”
“It is a very beautiful sonnet,—consisting of fourteen decasyllabic lines, expressing two phases of a single thought or sentiment,” said Evaine the Fox-Spirit,—“and I am proud to have inspired it.”
“You forget,” said Gerald, “that I have not yet recited my sonnet. I will now do so.”
And he did.
But his voice was so shaken with emotion that, when he had completed the octave, he paused, because it was never within Gerald’s power to resist the beauty of a sublime thought when it was thus adequately expressed in flawless verse. So for an instant he stayed silent.
He caught up the lovely hands of Evaine the Fox-Spirit, and as he pressed them to his trembling lips he noted that these hands smelled like hops drying in the sun. It seemed to him exceedingly pitiful he had given that promise to Tenjo. It seemed to him there was a certain sameness in the dear women who made colorful the Marches of Antan, and, to some extent, a similarity in their more intimate love passages with Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and Preserver. He found it depressing to reflect that destruction waited, so very near, for so much loveliness. He found it perfectly dreadful to foreknow that he would often regret this omniscient Evaine and her fine stores of useful information, once he had kept the divine word given to Tenjo, and had put an end to her living before she could do any further damage to the men of Lytreia.
Gods ought to abstain from all love-affairs: for through love alone might a god look to be wounded,—upon rainy Sunday afternoons, perhaps, or after drinking a bit more than was good for one,—to be wounded, at such unavoidable seasons of low vitality, with recurrent, plaguing memories of his mortal playthings, so dear, so very dear, and so soon reft away from his immortal arms, irrevocably....
After these cursory reflections, Gerald sighed, and—with the thoughtful commentary that, since this was a Miltonic sonnet, his poem here went on with the same sentence,—he continued his reciting.
And when he had ended, the Fox-Spirit sighed contentedly. She spoke with acumen and authority as to the main events of Milton’s life and as to his principal works, and she added: