"That's a horrid thing to say," said Mr. Russell. "But still I do love you."
"It sounds very Victorian and nice," said Jay, wondering if he could still see her through her veil of bad temper. "But, you know, in spite of Secret Worlds, and secret souls, and centuries of secret knowledge, we still have to keep up this 1916 farce, and leave something of ourselves in sensible London. How do I know you're not married?"
Mr. Russell thought for a very long time indeed, and then said, "I am."
Jay was not very well brought up. She did not stop the car and step out with dignity into respectable Hackney. She was just silent for a long time.
"As you were," she said to herself, when she found herself able to think again. "This is a bad day, but it will be over in something less than a hundred years."
"You drive well," she said presently, looking with relief from Mr.
Russell's face to his hands. Christina the motor car and two 'buses were
just then indulging in a figure like the opening steps of the Grand
Chain. "You drive as though driving were poetry and every mile a verse."
"After all," she told herself, "the man loves me, and I must at least take an intelligent interest in him."
"Are you a poet?" she added.
Nobody had ever asked Mr. Russell this question before, and not knowing the answer to it, he did not answer.
"I have never written a line of poetry," said Jay. "Or rather, I have several times written a line, but never another line to fit it. Yet because I have a Friend,—I know in what curious and extended order the verses come, and how the tunes come first, and the various voices next, and the words last, and how a good rhyme warms you like a fire, and how the tunes fall away when the thing is finished, and how ready-made it all is really, and yet how tired you feel…."