The old man shook his head. “That's all too fur away from home fur me. The women are afraid o' the water, and they'd never let me go alone. I kind o' just drifted into this New York business, but if I undertook to go across the ocean, that would be the last straw. And I'm afraid I couldn't get on to the manners and customs over there. They say everything's different from here. To tell the truth, I'm timid where I don't know the ways. If I was like you—I shouldn't wonder if you'd been to some of the other places where things happen in his novels?”
With a smile, Davenport began to enumerate and describe. The old man sat enraptured. The whisky and seltzer came up, and the host saw that the glasses were filled and refilled, but he kept Davenport to the same subject. Larcher felt himself quite out of the talk, but found compensation in the whisky and in watching the old man's greedy enjoyment of Davenport's every word. The afternoon waned, and all opportunity of making the intended sketches passed for that day. Mr. Bud was for lighting up, or inviting the young men to dinner, but they found pretexts for tearing themselves away. They did not go, however, until Davenport had arranged to come the next day and perform his neglected task. Mr. Bud accompanied them out, and stood on the corner looking after them until they were out of sight.
“You've made a hit with the agriculturist,” said Larcher, as they took their way through a narrow street of old warehouses toward the region of skyscrapers and lower Broadway.
“Scott is evidently his hobby,” replied Davenport, with a careless smile, “and I liked to please him in it.”
He lapsed into that reticence which, as it was his manner during most of the time, made his strange seasons of communicativeness the more remarkable. A few days passed before another such talkative mood came on in Larcher's presence.
It was a drizzling, cheerless night. Larcher had been to a dinner in Madison Avenue, and he thus found himself not far from Davenport's abode. Going thither upon an impulse, he beheld the artist seated at the table, leaning forward over a confusion of old books, some of them open. He looked pallid in the light of the reading lamp at his elbow, and his eyes seemed withdrawn deep into their hollows. He welcomed his visitor with conventional politeness.
“How's this?” began Larcher. “Do I find you pondering,
'... weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore?'”
“No; merely rambling over familiar fields.” Davenport held out the topmost book.
“Oh, Shakespeare,” laughed Larcher. “The Sonnets. Hello, you've marked part of this.”
“Little need to mark anything so famous. But it comes closer to me than to most men, I fancy.” And he recited slowly, without looking down at the page: