IV
NEW LOVES FOR OLD
“HOW is it,” said the Sphinx one evening, “that you never bring a poem with you to dinner nowadays? Have you quite given up writing them?”
“Almost,” I answered.
“But you shouldn’t. It is lazy of you.”
“I suppose,” said I, “it is a kind of laziness—but I hardly think it is voluntary, or much under my control. In many ways I grow more active and industrious as I grow older. I do more work and I work more regularly. The laziness is certainly neither mental nor physical. It is rather emotional—yes! a laziness of the emotional faculties.”
“You cannot mean that you have stopped falling in love?”
“I’m inclined to think I have,” I laughed; “but that, like the poetry, is only one expression of the laziness I mean. Generally, while, as I say, I am less lazy in doing than of old, and while, as doctors would say, my mental faculties are active and unimpaired, I grow more and more lazy in feeling.”
“Tell me some more....”