“Why?” I asked with masculine directness.
“I've been trying to educate myself—to read poetry. Look here”—she caught a small brown-covered octavo volume from the table. “I can't make head or tail of it. It proved to me that it was no use. If I couldn't understand poetry, I couldn't understand anything. It was no good trying to educate myself. I gave it up. And then I got what you don't like me to call the hump.”
“You dear Lola!” I cried, laughing. “I don't believe any one has ever made head or tail out of 'Sordello.' There once was a man who said there were only two intelligible lines in the poem—the first and the last—and that both were lies. 'Who will, may hear Sordello's story told,' and 'Who would, has heard Sordello's story told.' Don't worry about not understanding it.”
“Don't you?”
“Not a bit,” said I.
“That's a comfort,” she said, with a generous sigh of relief. “How well you're looking!” she cried suddenly. “You're a different man. What have you been doing to yourself?”
“I've grown quite alive.”
“Good! Delightful! So am I. Quite alive now, thank you.”
She looked it, in spite of the black outdoor costume. But there was a dash of white at her throat and some white lilies of the valley in her bosom, and a white feather in her great black hat poised with a Gainsborough swagger on the mass of her bronze hair.
“It's the spring,” she added.