"Faith, but he was really a poet—or, at least, at times——?"
"Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme——'"
"Dear, dear!" he said, in petulant vexation; "how horribly emotion botches verse. That clash of sibilants is both harsh and ungrammatical. Shall should be changed to will." And at that the woman sighed, because, in common with all persons who never essayed creative verbal composition, she was quite certain perdurable writing must spring from a surcharged heart, rather than from a rearrangement of phrases. And so,
"Very unfeignedly I regret my poet," she said, "my poet, who was unhappy and unreasonable, because I was not always wise or kind, or even just. And I did not know until to-day how much I loved my poet.… Yes, I know now I loved him. I must go now. I would I had not come."
Then, standing face to face, he cried, "Eh, madam, and what if I also have lied to you—in part? Our work is done; what more is there to say?"
"Nothing," she answered—"nothing. Not even for you, who are a master-smith of words to-day and nothing more."
"I?" he replied. "Do you so little emulate a higher example that even for a moment you consider me?"
She did not answer.
When she had gone, the playmaker sat for a long while in meditation; and then smilingly he took up his pen. He was bound for "an uninhabited island" where all disasters ended in a happy climax.
"So, so!" he was declaiming, later on: "We, too, are kin To dreams and visions; and our little life Is gilded by such faint and cloud-wrapped suns—Only, that needs a homelier touch. Rather, let us say, We are such stuff As dreams are made on—Oh, good, good!—Now to pad out the line.… In any event, the Bermudas are a seasonable topic. Now here, instead of thickly-templed India, suppose we write the still-vexed Bermoothes—Good, good! It fits in well enough.…"