"There you offer me a problem Miss—er—Miss—-"
"Bourne,"—finished Cicely—"Don't fight with my name—it's quite easy—though I don't know how I got it. I ought to have been a Tre or a Pol-I was born in Cornwall. Never mind that,—go on with the 'problem.'"
"True—go on with the problem,"—said Julian vaguely, taking off his hat and raking his hair with his fingers as he was wont to do when at all puzzled—"The problem is—'why do I write poetry if nobody wants to read it'—and 'what's the good'? Now, in the first place, I will reply that I am not sure I write 'poetry.' I try to express my identity in rhythm and rhyme—but after all, that expression of myself may be prose, and wholly without interest to the majority. You see? I put it to you quite plainly. Then as to 'what's the good?'—I would argue 'what's the bad?' So far, I live quite harmlessly. From the unexpected demise of an uncle whom I never saw, I have a life-income of sixty pounds a year. I am happy on that—I desire no more than that. On that I seek to evolve myself into SOMETHING—from a nonentity into shape and substance—and if, as is quite possible, there can be no 'good,' there may be a certain less of 'bad' than might otherwise chance to me. What think you?"
Cicely surveyed him scrutinisingly.
"I'm not at all sure about that"—she said—"Poets have all been doubtful specimens of humanity at their best. You see their lives are entirely occupied in writing what isn't true—and of course it tells' on them in the long run. They deceive others first, and then they deceive themselves, though in their fits of 'inspiration' as they call it, they may, while weaving a thousand lies, accidentally hit on one truth. But the lies chiefly predominate. Dante, for example, was a perfectly brazen liar. He DIDN'T go to Hell, or Purgatory, or Paradise—and he DIDN'T bother himself about Beatrice at all. He married someone else and had a family. Nothing could be more commonplace. He invented his Inferno in order to put his enemies there, all roasting, boiling, baking or freezing. It was pure personal spite—and it is the very force of his vindictiveness that makes the Inferno the best part of hid epic. The portraits of Dante alone are enough to show you the sort of man he was. WHAT a creature to meet in a dark lane at midnight!"
Here she made a grimace, drawing her mouth down into the elongated frown of the famous Florentine, with such an irresistibly comic effect that Adderley gave way to a peal of hearty, almost boyish laughter.
"That's right!" said Cicely approvingly—"That's YOU, you know! It's natural to laugh at your age—you're only about six or seven-and- twenty, aren't you?"
"I shall be twenty-seven in August,"—he said with a swift return to solemnity—"That is, as you will admit, getting on towards thirty."
"Oh, nonsense! Everybody's getting on towards thirty, of course—or towards sixty, or towards a hundred. I shall be fifteen in October, but 'you will admit'"—here she mimicked his voice and accent—"that I am getting on towards a hundred. Some folks think I've turned that already, and that I'm entering my second century, I talk so 'old.' But my talk is nothing to what I feel—I feel—oh!" and she gave a kind of angular writhe to her whole figure—"like twenty Methusalehs in one girl!"
"You are an original!"—said Julian, nodding at her with an air of superior wisdom—"That's what you are!"