Anne Dallas looked up and saw little Anne Berkley coming up the walk. Her table was beside the window, and she signalled to the child to be quiet. Little Anne at once dropped down on the steps and began to fan herself with her hat, for she understood the ways of the poet from past experience, and knew that she must wait to be admitted.
At last Richard Latham triumphantly cried: “Curtain!” and fell back in his chair, suddenly realizing that he was tired.
“Will it do, Miss Dallas? Could you judge it as you wrote it?” Richard asked.
“Oh, no, not judge it! It does far too well. I could not judge it. It is supremely fine and beautiful; it sweeps one along with it, but I know that it is the best thing that you have done,” cried Anne.
“I don’t know; I’m afraid it isn’t much good,” said Richard, despondently. “Oh, Lord! To feel something surging against your brain, your lips, almost as if it literally pushed your ribs out, then to be tongue-tied, to feel you’ve played it false when it wanted to be born of you, that you’ve strangled it at birth, or brought it forth deformed!”
“If you could express all that you feel you would not feel enough to be greatly worth expressing. It is neither slain nor deformed, but to you the wings that bore it to you seem clipped. Perhaps they may be, since your conception of it must exceed words, but you have made the rush of those wings audible to others.”
Anne arose as she spoke and rang for tea. She was used to dealing with the poet’s reaction from the delight of creation; she understood it.
“How you help me!” Richard smiled at her and put out his hand; Anne’s skirt brushed it as she crossed the room.
“It’s a hard thing to feel one minute like a tower reaching to heaven, and the next like a toppled card house.”
“Yes, it’s hard, but it doesn’t really matter, because you know it’s only nervous reaction. It would matter if you took the tower or the card house seriously, especially the tower! But you never lose your perspective. It’s a great deal to be a perfectly sane great poet!” Anne laughed, and added, “Little Anne has been meekly sitting on the steps for some time. I signalled her to wait until you were finished. Shall I call her now?”