er to
secure a patron--yes, and to get your profit of him--and you were
always ill-at-ease among us. Our youth is so long past, and we two are
so altered that we, I think, may speak of its happenings now without
any bitterness. I hated those sordid, petty traits. I raged at your
incessant pretensions to gentility because I knew you to be so much
more than a gentleman. Oh, it infuriated me--how long ago it was!--to
see you cringing to the Court blockheads, and running their errands,
and smirkingly pocketing their money, and wheedling them into helping
the new play to success. You complained I treated you like a lackey;
it was not unnatural when of your own freewill you played the lackey so
assiduously."

He laughed. He had anatomized himself too frequently and with too much
dispassion to overlook whatever tang of snobbishness might be in him;
and, moreover, the charge thus tendered became in reality the speaker's
apology, and hurt nobody's self-esteem.

"Faith, I do not say you are altogether in the wrong," he assented.
"They could be very useful to me--Pembroke, and Southampton, and those
others--and so I endeavored to render my intimacy acceptable. It was
my business as a poet to make my play as near perfect as I could; and
this attended to, common-sense demanded of the theater-manager that he
derive as much money as was possible from its representation. What
would you have? The man of letters, like the carpenter or the
blacksmith, must live by the vending of his productions, not by the
eating of them." The woman waved this aside.

She paced the grass in meditation, the peach leaves brushing her proud
head--caressingly, it seemed to him. Later she came nearer in a
brand-new mood. She smiled now, and her voice was musical and thrilled
with wonder. "But what a poet Heaven had locked inside this little
parasite! It used to puzzle me." She laughed, and ever so lightly.
"Eh, and did you never understand why by preference I talked with you
at evening from my balcony? It was because I could forget you then
entirely. There was only a voice in the dark. There was a sorcerer at
whose bidding words trooped like a conclave of emperors, and now sang
like a bevy of linnets. And wit and fancy and high aspirations and my
love--because I knew then that your love for me was splendid and
divine--these also were my sorcerer's potent allies. I understood then
how glad and awed were those fabulous Greekish queens when