CAT: What was the line you read last, Bowl?

BOWL (With chilly diffidence): Le jardin est si plein de fleurs rouges … The garden is so full of tawny flowers.

BROOMSTICK: Remarkable!

CAT: He translates fleurs rouges by tawny flowers.

BROOMSTICK: Why not?

[at this point a page is missing]

BOWL: Are incongruous.

CAT: YOU see.

BOWL: They are incongruous at that age. It is an age when red becomes tawny, when blue becomes aerial — and when a girl, at least, when a girl like Claire Dupray, becomes a poetess.

CAT: Say poet — poet. I hate poetess.

BROOMSTICK: Oh, poetess is just the word at twenty-two! What you are thinking of is forty-two.

CAT: YOU are right, old Broomstick. May I see the portrait?

Bowl hands him the book.

You speak of her hair because her head is bare.

BROOMSTICK: It is only the poetess of forty-two that sits for a portrait covered.

BOWL: I speak of her hair because in the case of a poetess, in the sense in which that word is just and beautiful, the speaking of it means so much to the portrait of her.

CAT: More than her nose or her chin? She has a delicate nose. She has a good chin.

BROOMSTICK: She has a good chin! Oh, ho! She has a good chin. Has she?

BOWL: Her hair reveals her. Three things live in the portrait of a poetess: her hair, her eyes and her mouth. These make it possible to discover something of what she is from the image of her. Claire Dupray has black hair. It is arranged simply, but, for all that, it remains full of the long motions of her bare arms. Is not that a part of her? What are we to expect from such a poetess? Waxen odes? Skimped meditations? Let me have the book.

Cat hands him the book.

Take this poem on twilight. What does she see in twilight? Not the commonplace end of daily momentum. She sees the light continuing to burn in stars. She says that the sun burns all night. And, in that, she sees the incessant momentum that tranquillizes because of the knowledge that it is immortal. The sun burns all night. She says that she will love as long as she lives.

CAT (Fascinated): She is glorious.

BROOMSTICK: HOW little it would take to turn the poets into the only true comedians! There’s no truer comedy than this hodge-podge of men and sunlight, women and moonlight, houses and clouds, and so on.

BOWL: Nor any truer tragedy.

BROOMSTICK: NO one believes in tragedy.

CAT: At twenty-two —

BROOMSTICK: That brings us to her eyes.

BOWL: But her eyes are nothing unless you believe in tragedy.

CAT: I believe.

BROOMSTICK: Poor sensualist! You think you believe. The truth is, you believe in eyes.

CAT: Have you seen the portrait?

He hands Broomstick the book.

Now, we shall have Broomstick on eyes.

BROOMSTICK: I concede that these eyes are capable of tragedy. But that is not the same thing as tragedy itself: and it is tragedy itself that we were speaking of.