just. And I did not know until to-day how much I loved my
poet. . . . Yes, I know now I loved him. I must go now. I would I
had not come."

Then, standing face to face, he cried, "Eh, madam, and what if I also
have lied to you--in part? Our work is done; what more is there to
say?"

"Nothing," she answered--"nothing. Not even for you, who are a
master-smith of words to-day and nothing more."

"I?" he replied. "Do you so little emulate a higher example that even
for a moment you consider me?"

She did not answer.

When she had gone, the playmaker sat for a long while in meditation;
and then smilingly he took up his pen. He was bound for "an
uninhabited island" where all disasters ended in a happy climax.

"So, so!" he was declaiming, later on: "_We, too, are kin To dreams and
visions; and our little life Is gilded by such faint and cloud-wrapped
suns_--Only, that needs a homelier touch. Rather, let us say, _We are
such stuff As dreams are made on_--Oh, good, good!--Now to pad out the
line. . . . In any event, the Bermudas are a seasonable topic. Now
here, instead of _thickly-templed India_, suppose we write _the
still-vexed Bermoothes_--Good, good! It fits in well enough. . . ."

And so in clerkly fashion he sat about the accomplishment of his stint
of labor in time for dinner. A competent workman is not disastrously
upset by interruption; and, indeed, he found the notion of surprising
Judith with an unlooked-for trinket or so to be at first a very
efficacious spur to composition.

And presently the strong joy of creating kindled in him, and phrase
flowed abreast with thought, and the playmaker wrote fluently and
surely to an accompaniment of contented ejaculations. He regretted
nothing, he would not now have laid aside his pen to take up a scepter.
For surely--he would have said--to live untroubled, and weave beautiful
and winsome dreams is the most desirable of human fates. But he did
not consciously think of this, because he was midcourse in the evoking
of a mimic tempest which, having purged its victims of unkindliness and
error, aimed (in the end) only to sink into an amiable calm.

CONCERNING CORINNA

"_Dr. Herrick told me that, in common with all the Enlightened or
Illuminated Brothers, of which prying sect the age breeds so many, he
trusted the great lines of Nature, not in the whole, but in part, as
they believed Nature was in certain senses not true, and a betrayer,
and th