I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.
“Iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, they shall dive and they shall run,
Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun.”
“So he did!” cried Triona. “How wonderful of you to remember! Why—the dear beautiful old thief!” He forgot the point at issue in contemplation of the literary coincidence of plagiarism. “Well, I’m damned! Such a crib! With the early Victorian veil of prudery over it! Oh, Lord! Give me the Elizabethan, any day. Yet, isn’t it funny? The period-spirit? If Tennyson had been an Elizabethan, he would have walked over Beaumont and Fletcher like a Colossus; but in a world under the awe of Queen Victoria’s red flannel petticoat he is reduced to stealing Elizabethan thunder and reproducing it with a bit of sheet iron and a stick.”
“Dear,” said Olivia, “we have much to be thankful for.”
“You and I?” he queried.
“Our generation. We live in the sun. No longer under the shadow of the red flannel petticoat.”
Rapturously he called her a marvel among women. Olivia’s common sense discounted the hyperbole; but she loved his tribute to her sally of wit.
The book slipped to the floor, while she began an argument on the morality of plagiarism. How far was a man justified in stealing another man’s idea, working up another man’s material?
His sudden and excited defence of the plagiarist surprised her. He rose, strode about the room and, talking, grew eloquent; quoted Shakespeare as the great exemplar of the artist who took his goods from everywhere he found them. Olivia, knowing his joy in conversational fence, made smiling attack.