uppose the soul of man
during the past two or three years has been much as it was in the reign
of Queen Elizabeth and of--whoever it was that reigned over the Greek
pastures. And I daresay the modern poets are making the same old silly
distortions. But forgive me," she added gently, "perhaps you yourself
are a poet?"

"Only since yesterday," answered the Duke (not less unfairly to himself
than to Roger Newdigate and Thomas Gaisford). And he felt he was
especially a dramatic poet. All the while that she had been sitting by
him here, talking so glibly, looking so straight into his eyes, flashing
at him so many pretty gestures, it was the sense of tragic irony
that prevailed in him--that sense which had stirred in him, and been
repressed, on the way from Judas. He knew that she was making her effect
consciously for the other young men by whom the roof of the barge was
now thronged. Him alone she seemed to observe. By her manner, she might
have seemed to be making love to him. He envied the men she was so
deliberately making envious--the men whom, in her undertone to him, she
was really addressing. But he did take comfort in the irony. Though she
used him as a stalking-horse, he, after all, was playing with her as a
cat plays with a mouse. While she chattered on, without an inkling that
he was no ordinary lover, and coaxing him to present two quite ordinary
young men to her, he held over her the revelation that he for love of
her was about to die.

And, while he drank in the radiance of her beauty, he heard her
chattering on. "So you see," she was saying, "it couldn't do those young
men any harm. Suppose unrequited love IS anguish: isn't the discipline
wholesome? Suppose I AM a sort of furnace: shan't I purge, refine,
temper? Those two boys are but scorched from here. That is horrid; and
what good will it do them?" She laid a hand on his arm. "Cast them into
the furnace for their own sake, dear Duke! Or cast one of them, or," she
added, glancing round at the throng, "any one of these others!"

"For their own sake?" he echoed, withdrawing his arm. "If you were not,
as the whole world knows you to be, perfectly respectable, there might
be something in what you say. But as it is, you can but be an engine for
mischief; and your sophistries leave me unmoved. I shall certainly keep
you to myself."

"I hate you," said Zuleika, with an ugly petulance that crowned the
irony.

"So long as I live," uttered the Duke, in a level v