“Did I say Myrtle? Goody, isn’t that strange! No, her name was Mary. Fancy me calling her Myrtle! Well, this poor girl set out one night to bring her Alan provisions and she was caught in a blizzard and frozen to death. The chaplain at Glenbogle Castle made a poem about it which he read to us. It was terribly sad. I felt I wanted to cry.”

The more modern poet made a scornful noise.

“I expect it was a ghastly poem.”

“Well, it was an old-fashioned kind of a poem,” Myrtle admitted. “I mean to say, when he’d finished reading you knew just what had happened.”

“As you would after reading a paragraph of a newspaper,” Alan said derisively. “I thought you told me you weren’t romantic.”

“I’m not romantic. I’m terribly practical. I’m more practical than you are.”

“How do you make that out?”

“Well, while you were sitting around writing poetry, you forgot you’d run out of food, and if it hadn’t been for Carrie and me you’d have been walking along Glenbogle now in all this rain to go and fetch it, and your friend Mr Buchanan would have had to wait till about five o’clock this afternoon for his lunch. You ought to write a poem about that.”

“Well, I’ll tell you something, Myrtle, I did write a poem about you.”

“You did? Oh, Alan, I’m thrilled to death. Nobody ever wrote a poem about me. I guess the only poets I ever knew were all too sissie. Is it a long poem?”

“No, it’s very short.”

“Could you … would you say it to me? What’s it called?”

“I call it Peaty Water.”

The blue eyes of the poet burned as he gazed in front of him and intoned in a voice from which the faintest breath of dramatic expression had been ruthlessly eliminated:

“The heather,

The fading heather,

Is spread like the robe of a dead king

Upon my country,

Upon my dying country.

I do not lament therefore, but laugh

When down through the stale dead purple

Dances the peaty water

Warm with the sharp sun of the high tops,

Prickt by the sun of the high tops,

The prattling peaty dark-brown water,

The warm dark-brown water of life.”

“Yes, go on,” said Myrtle when the poet stopped and looked at her intensely.

“That’s all. I’m afraid you’ll think it rather old-fashioned. Imagist poetry has not kept its hold upon contemporary expression, but I would justify it by the old-fashioned circumstances in which it was written.”

“But I thought you said you’d written a poem about me?” Myrtle asked in a puzzled voice.

“That poem is about you.”

“Do you mind saying it once again?”

Once more the poet gazed fiercely in front of him from blazing blue eyes and intoned Peaty Water.