"The First Church of Christ at Delphi? Christian Science, you mean? I'm afraid I don't understand," he stammered at length.

She stared as if she didn't either; then she gave a little laugh. "Well, no, nothing quite so recent. The legend is about the first temple of Delphi—(I mean the Greek Delphi, the famous shrine, where Apollo's oracle was)—well, the legend is that the first temple was only a hut of feathers and honey, built in that uninhabited place by the bees and birds, who knew there was a god there long before man came and discovered him… ." She broke off, and folded up the paper. "That's a subject for another poem, isn't it? … But this one," she added, rousing herself, and turning again to Vance with her look of eager encouragement, "this I do like immensely. You'll let me keep it? I have a great friend who really cares for poetry, and I want to show it to him. And won't you repeat another? Please do. I love lying here and listening to beautiful words all mixed up with the sound of water and leaves … Only you know, Vance," she added, fixing him suddenly with a piercing humorous glance, "I should leave 'urge' as a noun to the people who write blurbs for book jackets; and 'dawn' and lorn' do not rhyme in English poetry, not yet… ."

A silence followed. The girl's praise and understanding—above all, her understanding—had swung Vance so high above his everyday self that it was as if, at her touch, wings had grown from him. And now, abruptly, her verbal criticism, suggesting other possibilities of the same kind, hinting at abysses of error into which he might drop unawares at any moment, brought him down like a shot bird. He hardly understood what she meant, did not know what there was to find fault with in the English of the people who wrote for book jackets—it was indeed the sort of thing he aspired to excel in some day himself—and still less understood what she meant when she attacked the validity of rhymes as self-evident to the ear as "lorn" and "dawn." Perverse and arbitrary as she evidently was—and sound-deaf, probably—she might as well have said (very likely would, if challenged) that "morn" and "gone" did not rhyme in English poetry! He was so passionately interested in everything concerning the material and the implements of his art that at another time he would have welcomed a discussion of the sort; but in this hour of creative exaltation, when his imagination was still drenched with the wonder of the adventure, and the girl's praise, as she listened, had already started a twitter of new rhythms and images in his brain, it was like falling from a mortal height to have such praise qualified by petty patronizing comments, which were all the more disturbing because he found no answer to them.