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“UNPREMEDITATION.”
“In the tube. Several, With intonation. Red, red, red. A square fabric Once white With intention. Soiled, soiled, soiled. Six hundred hundred million Swarm like vermin, Without intention. Redder. Redder. Drip, drip, drip. A goes west, B goes east, C goes north, Pink, pink, pink. Two white squares. And a coat-sleeve. Without intention, Intonations. Pinker. Redder. Six hundred hundred million. Billions. Trillions. A week. Two weeks. Otherwise? Eternity.” |
Jim’s features had become a trifle glassy. “You do skip a few words,” he said, “don’t you?”
“Words are animalculæ. Some skip, some gyrate, some sub-divide.”
He put a brave face on the matter: “If you’re not really guying me,” he ventured, “would you tell me a little about your poem?”
“Why, yes,” she replied amiably. “To put it redundantly, then, I have sketched in my poem a man in the subway, with influenza, which infects others in his vicinity.”
She rose, smiled, and sauntered off, leaving him utterly unable to determine whether or not he had been outrageously imposed upon. Palla rescued him, and he went with her, a little wild-eyed, downstairs to the nearly empty and carpetless drawing-room, where a music box was playing and people were already dancing.
Toward midnight, Marya, passing Jim on her way to the front door, leaned wide from Vanya’s arm:
“Let us at least discuss my rainbow theory,” she said, laughing, and her face a shade too close to his; and continued on, still clinging to the sleeve of Vanya’s fur-lined coat.
Ilse was the last to leave, with Estridge waiting behind her to hold her wrap.