At that she laughed: “You nice youth,” she said, “if you’d talk that way to your sweetheart she’d sit up and listen.... Which I’m afraid she doesn’t, so far.”
He felt himself flushing, but he refused to wince under her amused analysis.
“You’ve simply got to have imagination, you know,” she insisted. “Otherwise, you don’t get anywhere at all. Have you read my smears?”
“Smears?”
“Bacteriologists take a smear of something on a glass slide and slip it under a microscope. My poems are like that. The words are the bacteria. Few can identify them.”
“Are you serious?”
“Entirely.”
He maintained his gravity: “Would you be kind 218 enough to take a smear and let me look?” he inquired politely.
“Certainly: the experiment is called ‘Unpremeditation.’”
She dropped one thin and silken knee over the other and crossed her hands on it as she recited her poem.