and did not see the palpitating feminine heart inside, was displeased
and half-cold.

Could any one be long cold to Mae Madden? She believed not. She was
quite accustomed to lightning-like white heats of anger in those with
whom she came in contact, but coldness was out of her line. Still
she met the occasion well. "Shall I give you some coffee?" she asked,
pleasantly. "We breakfast all alone, until Eric appears. Mrs. Jerrold is
not well, and Edith and Albert are off for Frascati."

"Poor child; how much alone she is," he thought to himself.

"I understand we all go to the play tonight?" queried Mae.

"The thought of Shakspeare dressed in Italian is not pleasant to me,"
said Mr. Mann, after a silence of a few minutes.

"I am quite longing to see him in his new clothes. There is so much
softness and beauty in Italian that I expect to gain new ideas from
hearing the play robed in more flowing phrases. Shakspeare certainly is
for all the world."

"But Shakspeare's words are so strongly chosen that they are a great
element in his great plays. And a translation at best is something of a
parody, especially a translation from a northern tongue, with its
force and backbone, so to speak, into a southern, serpentine, gliding
language. You have heard the absurd rendering of that passage from
Macbeth where the witches salute him with 'Hail to thee, Macbeth! Hail
to thee, Thane of Cawdor!' into such French as 'Comment vous portez
vous, Monsieur Macbeth; comment vous portez vous, Monsieur Thane de
Cawdor!' A translation must pass through the medium of another mind, and
other minds like Shakspeare's are hard to find."

Norman spoke with so much reverence for Mae's greatest idol that her
heart warmed and she smiled approval, though for argument's sake she
remained on the other side.

"Isn't a translation more like an engraver's art, and aren't fine
engravings to be sought and admired even when we know the great original
in its glory of color? Then all writing is only translation, not
copying. Shakspeare had to translate the tongues he found in stones,
the books he found in brooks, with twenty-six little characters and his
great mind, into what we all study, and love, and strive after. But
he had to use these twenty-six characters in certain hard, Anglo-Saxon
forms and confine himself to them. When he wanted to talk about

'fen-sucked fogs,'

and such damp, shivery places, he is all right, but when he sings of
'love's