With Dorothy, he reflected, he could sit idly at a table or walk along the street and express his thoughts—he had need to express them to some one. He wished, too, that Margaret did not so openly disapprove of what he had said in defense of the Negro that evening at his home. For a woman, anyway, he would have preferred that Margaret take the more humane point of view. He was old-fashioned enough to believe that a woman should display the softer virtues.
“What are you thinking about?” Margaret pouted coquettishly. “You haven’t said a word to me for five minutes, excepting monosyllables.”
“Oh, a lot of things. I—”
“Well, you mustn’t. That’s a bad habit. You should live instead of thinking about it. See ‘how sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.’”
Margaret’s mood could change from the colloquial to the mock poetic in a moment. When she quoted poetry it was with a little exaggerated air, as though she were pretending to act.
“‘Eat thou and drink,’” she quoted grandiloquently, “‘tomorrow thou shalt die.’ That’s what Howard recites to me sometimes. Don’t you think that’s right?”
“Yes, perhaps it is, but it’s only one point of view. Rossetti, you know, wrote three sonnets, each giving a different viewpoint, and that is only one of them.”
“Oh, is that so? Anyway, I think it’s very beautiful. Don’t you?”
Margaret relapsed into her poetic mood. She would ask Robert if he had heard this or that and then recite it with her coquettishly exaggerated emotion. It was very delightful on the whole. If she wished to sit closer to him, too, or hold his hand she could do it in play, as though it were part of the gestures accompanying the recitation. Some of the poems she quoted, Robert thought splendid, but others were sentimental bits that she had picked up from the fillers in the evening newspaper. She would quote, almost in the same breath with Shakespeare, the rhymed imbecilities of a syndicate humorist whose chief contribution to poesy was his method of arranging the lines so that they were separated by little asterisks and so that one had to read from the bottom line to the top. Probably otherwise nobody would ever read the stuff. The announced object of arranging the lines from bottom to top was to get the reader in the habit of always looking upward and onward to higher things, the highest thing being the rhymster’s signature, Milt Elkron, on the very pinnacle.
There were quarter hours, too, when Margaret would discuss “books,” that is, fiction. Here, too, she would speak of O. Henry, Henry James and James Branch Cabell with indiscriminate enthusiasm, although the first of the three was the only one of whom she had really read more than one volume.