just a very uncertain way of making money--Judith, who
cannot tell a B from a bull's foot,--why, Judith, madam, did not ask,
but gave, what was divine."

"You are unfair," she cried. "Oh, you are cruel, you juggle words,
make knives of them. . . . You" and she spoke as with difficulty--"you
have no right to know just how I loved my boy! You should be either
man or woman!"

He said pensively: "Yes, I am cruel. But you had mirth and beauty
once, and I had only love and a vocabulary. Who then more flagrantly
abused the gifts God gave? And why should I not be cruel to you, who
made a master-poet of me for your recreation? Lord, what a deal of
ruined life it takes to make a little art! Yes, yes, I know. Under
old oaks lovers will mouth my verses, and the acorns are not yet shaped
from which those oaks will spring. My adoration and your perfidy, all
that I have suffered, all that I have failed in even, has gone toward
the building of an enduring monument. All these will be immortal,
because youth is immortal, and youth delights in demanding explanations
of infinity. And only to this end I have suffered and have catalogued
the ravings of a perverse disease which has robbed my life of all the
normal privileges of life as flame shrivels hair from the arm--that
young fools such as I was once might be pleased to murder my rhetoric,
and scribblers parody me in their fictions, and schoolboys guess at the
date of my death!" This he said with more than ordinary animation; and
then he shook his head. "There is a leaven," he said--"there is a
leaven even in your smuggest and most inconsiderable tradesman."

She answered, with a wistful smile: "I, too, regret my poet. And just
now you are more like him----"

"Faith, but he was really a poet--or, at least, at times----?"

"Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this
powerful rhyme----'"

"Dear, dear!" he said, in petulant vexation; "how horribly emotion
botches verse. That clash of sibilants is both harsh and
ungrammatical. _Shall_ should be changed to _will_." And at that the
woman sighed, because, in common with all persons who never essayed
creative verbal composition, she was quite certain perdurable writing
must spring from a surcharged heart, rather than from a rearrangement
of phrases. And so,

"Very unfeignedly I regret my poet," she said, "my poet, who was
unhappy and unreasonable, because I was not always wise or kind, or
even