lived, I have never grown old. Life translates itself into
music--a wild "Invitation to the Waltz" by some Archangel Weber. I laugh
out loud. Polyphemus, who has been regarding me with his one bantering
eye from Carlotta's corner on the sofa, leaps to the ground and
grotesquely curvets round the room in a series of impish hops. Heigh,
old boy? Do the pulsations of the music throb in your veins, too? Come
along and let us make a night of it. To the Devil with sleep. We'll go
together down to the cellar and find a bottle of Pommery, and we will
drink to Life and Youth and Love and the Splendour and the Joy thereof.

He utters a little cry of delight and frisks around me. In the blackness
of the cellar his one eye gleams like a star and he purrs unutterable
rapture. My hand passed over his back produces a shower of sparks.
We return up the silent stairs, I carry a bottle of Pommery and a
milkjug--for you shall revel, too, Polyphemus; and as I have forgotten
to bring a saucer, you shall drink, as no cat has drunk before, from
an old precious platter bearing the arms of the Estes of Ferrara--over
which Lucrezia Borgia laughed when the world was young. It is a pity
cats don't drink champagne. I would have made you to-night as drunk as
Bacchus. We drink, and in the stillness the glouglou of his tongue forms
a bass to the elfin notes of the Pommery in the soda-water tumbler.

Ha! Twin purveyors of the milk of paradise, I wonder like Omar what
you buy one-half so precious as the stuff you sell. Motor-cars for Mrs.
Pommery and cakes for the little Grenos? I do not like to regard you as
common humans addicted to silk hats and umbrellas and the other vices of
respectability. Ye are rather beneficent demigods, Castor and Pollux of
the vine, dream entities who pour from the sunset lands of Nowhere the
liquid gold of life's joyousness.

A few words scribbled on this telegraph form would bring her here
tomorrow night. But no. What is a week? Leaden-footed, it is an
eternity; but winged with the dove's iris it is a mere moment. Besides,
I must accustom myself to my youth. I must investigate its follies,
I must learn the grammar of its wisdom. We'll take counsel together,
Polyphemus, how to turn these chambers, fusty with decayed thought, into
a bridal bower radiant and fragrant with innumerable loves. Let us drink
again to her witchery. It is her breath itself distilled by the Heavenly
Twins that foams against my lips. I would give th