a poet _need_
not be fifty! Young men can be poets too, and though they blunder, there
is something endearing in their blunders; moreover, one day they will be
as "firm, quiet, and gay" as he, as expert in deceiving the world, which
is all, in the last analysis, that such a man does.

For, if he _had_ spoken to her that day, what would he have said? (She
is still expounding to him the situation of this potential married pair,
as she has divined in her long musings that he then foresaw it.) He
would not have said, like a boy, "Love me or I die." But neither would
he have said the truth, which was simply that he wished to use her young
ardour and vitality to help his age. Such was the demand which she (as,
according to her, he then reasoned it out) would in time have accused
him, tacitly or not, of having made upon her. . . . And what would his
own reflections have been? She is ready to use her disconcerting
clairvoyance for these also; nay, she can do more, she can tell him the
very moment at which he acted upon them in advance! For as they
foreshadowed themselves, he had ceased to press gently her arm to his
side--she remembers well the stopping of that tender pressure, and now
can connect the action with its mental source. _His_ reflection, then,
would have been simply that he had thrown himself away, had bartered all
he was and had been and might be--all his culture, knowledge of the
world, guerdons of gold and great renown--for what? For "two cheeks
freshened by youth and sea": a mere nosegay. _Him_, in exchange for a
nosegay!

"That ended me." . . .

They duly admired the "grey sad church," on the cliff-top, with its
scattered graveyard crosses, its garlands where the swallows perched;
they "took their look" at the sea and sky, wondering afresh at the
general ignorance of so attractive a little hole; then, finding the sun
really too scorching, they descended, got back to the baths, to such
civilisation as there was:

"And then, good-bye! Ten years since then:
Ten years! We meet: you tell me, now,
By a window-seat for that cliff-brow,
On carpet-stripes for those sand-paths."

Ten years. He has a notorious liaison with a dancer at the Opera; she
has married lovelessly. They have met again, and, in sentimental mood,
he has recalled that sojourn, has begun to make a kind of tentative love
to her, probably unimpaired in beauty, certainly more intellectually
interesting, for the whole