In my un-Keats hours I am mostly mournful. And Josephina sober has all the melancholy of her race with an added gloom, as if the acetylene had run out of all her lamps. That my melancholy is more lustrous than hers I lay to her native dullness as against my native braininess, and to alcohol’s having rotting effects on human mental tissues: whilst John Keats to those who drink his poetry is a starry savior.
I like to think there’s the same ambrosial food in the Demon Rum for Josephina as in the Grecian Urn for me.
There seems no other pleasure in life for her.
The limit of her literary pursuit is the reading of a four-page Finnish newspaper full of obituaries.
The opalescent enchantments of her inner being mean nothing to her: she wouldn’t know her entity from her duodenum.
Her body can bring her no delight: there’s no lightness to it, no tang, no feminine charm, no consciousness to make her love it as the Dianas love theirs.
A sunset above the western peaks is less than a setting sun to her.
Her food is merely her fodder.
Love and Romance pass her by. She and the husband vie with each other for solitary possession of their little nasty house. And her personality is not conducive to lovers.