"You are addressing Keats, John Keats."
"I tell you, Mister Keats, there ain't no beauty when you're up against it. I tell you—"
"Won't you accept this rose?"
"I'll take it," growled Slavinsky with unnecessary fierceness. "It ain't Nature's fault. She don't go in for profiteering." The agitator's conversational style was more colloquial though no less vehement than his platform manner.
"Did you note the omission?" Keats inquired when we were again on the avenue.
"It isn't impoliteness," I replied. "Men of his class are too stirred by cosmic problems to say 'Thank you.'"
"It is a beautiful thing to say, nevertheless, and the world needs it." I thought the eyes of John Keats—a fitting name for such a fantastic personality—were filling with tears.
My companion held his rose before him as if it were a charm against the sordidness about him. He had a way of peering at the people we passed as if he were looking for someone he had lost in the crowd. At Sixteenth Street we turned into the small park at the right of the avenue, which with its neighbor on the left keeps alive the memory of green and growing things among the dwellers of the tenements.
It was at the fountain that he first saw her. John Keats had an abrupt manner, for all his gentleness, of proceeding along the path of his desires.
"At last I have found you," he said to the tall girl who was watching a group of youngsters at play near the gushing waters. In the darkness I could see only a pair of flashing eyes under a broad-brimmed straw and a cape of soft blue hanging gracefully from her shoulders.