“Wine, did you say?” he cried. “Certainly—let’s have a magnum. Bottled sunlight should help to dissipate visions.”
“Anacreon has something to that effect in one of his odes; though he vowed that he worshiped Wine, Woman, and the Muses in equal measure.”
“Who is Anacreon?” asked the man from Plainville.
“He flourished at Athens about 600 B.C.,” laughed Dacre.
“Did he? By gosh! The Greeks knew a bit, then, even at that time.”
“This one in particular was an authority on those three topics. Love, to him, was no mischievous boy armed with silver darts, but a giant who struck with a smith’s hammer. He died like a gentleman, too, being choked by a grapestone at the age of eighty-five.”
“Ah, that explains it!”
“Explains what?”
“He had a small swallow, or rum and romance would have knocked him out in half the time.”
Power was rapidly becoming himself again. “I behaved like a stupid boy just now,” he said; “but I was never more taken aback in my life. I have not met Mrs. Marten since her marriage, three years ago, and I imagined she was in Europe.”