People read poems, discussed Yeats, Shaw, Fiona, Mendes, and L’Arr Noovo; sang, wandered about pinching or thumbing the atmosphere under stimulus of a cunningly and unexpectedly set window-pane in the back of a “mission” rocking-chair. And when the proper moment arrived the poet would rise, exhaling sweetness from every pore of his bulky entity, to interpret what he called a “Thought.” Sometimes it was a demonstration of the priceless value of “nothings”; sometimes it was a naive suggestion that no house could afford to be without an “Art”-rocker with Arr Noovo insertions. Such indispensable luxuries were on sale up-stairs. Again, he performed a “necklace of precious sounds”—in other words, some verses upon various topics, nature, woodchucks, and the dinkified in Art.
And it was upon one of these occasions that Aphrodite ran away.
Aphrodite, the sweet, the reasonable, the
self-possessed—Aphrodite ran away, having without any apparent reason been stricken with an overpowering aversion for civilization and Arr Noovo.
[ XIII]
t the poet’s third Franco-American Conference that afternoon the room was still vibrating with the echoes of Aphrodite’s harp accompaniment to her own singing, and gushing approbation had scarcely ceased, when the poet softly rose and stood with eyes half-closed as though concentrating all the sweetness within him upon the surface of his pursed lips.
A wan young man whose face figured only as a by-product of his hair whispered “Hush!” and several people, who seemed to be more or less out of drawing, assumed