CYNICUS. He earns his dose.

ARDILAUN. Money again! That's all you think of--it's all my wife thinks
about. Petty parsimonies, cramping retrenchments, harrowing details of
household economy----

CYNICUS. Very necessary, even in the _menage_ of a popular poet.

ARDILAUN. They needn't be flaunted. To come in and read your most
brilliant stanzas to a woman who never looks up from darning----

CYNICUS. Your socks?

ARDILAUN. When you know of another who would listen to every word and
criticise----

CYNICUS. Pick holes, not mend them!

ARDILAUN. Who would share your highest exaltations and lift you----

CYNICUS. Off your feet, till you bashed your crown against the hard fact
of orthodox opinion.

ARDILAUN. What is opinion to souls the law of the higher intelligence
has made twin?

CYNICUS. A thorny briar, with twenty prickles to the rose.

ARDILAUN. What were a thousand prickles to one such rose?

CYNICUS. I concede, Letitia is too fine a prize to be lost for a
scratch--a thousand scratches.

ARDILAUN. Well said--now you speak like a man.

CYNICUS. She must be grasped and all the little spikes allowed to probe
their way through the skin. You can rise at cock-crow and salve your
wounds with morning dew--you rival the lark sometimes, don't
you?--you----

ARDILAUN. Nothing to laugh at. I find my best inspirations at sunrise,
when the first glow of day blushes through the trees.

CYNICUS (_scratching his chin and looking at the ceiling_). Letitia
sleeps till nine. Her inspirations blaze best in moonlight. At dawn her
rest commences and is never broken--no, not even by the "apoplectic
pug." He slinks off on tip-toe to his money-grubbing in the city.

ARDILAUN. Does she work so hard?

CYNICUS. Books like Letitia's are not written without mental strain.
Poets may weave, like spiders, from their innermost, but authors grind.

ARDILAUN. Noble woman! Yet she shows no signs of fatigue.

CYNICUS. The "pug" again. Snacks before she goes out, snacks when she
comes home; oysters and stout at eleven, by his orders. Saves the
digestion and helps to recuperate, he thinks.

ARDILAUN. But eating in the usual way----

CYNICUS. Couldn't be done by genius; nothing so conventional.

ARDILAUN. Me you put outside the pale?

CYNICUS. Oh no; you've your vagaries, though not as to time. How about
the vegetarian diet and distilled water?

ARDILAUN. The simplicity of the philosophers.

CYNICUS. Troublesome to keep going?