"Yes."
"I hated to have her come," Marie-Louise confessed, "and now I should hate to have her go away. She calls herself a country mouse, and I am showing her the sights—we go to corking places—on pilgrimages. We went to Grant's tomb, and she made me carry a wreath. And we ride in the subway and drink hot chocolate in drug stores.
"She says I haven't learned the big lessons of democracy," Marie-Louise pursued, "that I've looked out over the world, but that I have never been a part of it. That I've sat on a tower in a garden and have peered through a telescope."
She told him of the play that she had written, and of the verses that she had read to the piping Pan.
Later she pointed out Pan to him from the window of the big drawing-room. The snow had melted in the last mild days, and there was an icicle on his nose, and the sun from across the river reddened his cheeks.
"And there, everlastingly, he makes music," Geoffrey said, "'on the reed which he tore from the river.'"
" 'Yes, half a beast is the great god, Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man.
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,
For the reed that grows nevermore again,
As a reed with the reeds in the river.'"
His voice died away into silence. "That is the price which the writer pays. He is separated, as it were, from his kind."
"Oh, no," Marie-Louise breathed, "oh, no. Not you. Your writings bring you—close. Your book made me—cry."
She was such a child as she stood there, yet with something in her, too, of womanliness.