BOWL: Then let me amend what I said: and say, instead, that her eyes are nothing unless you believe in eyes.

BROOMSTICK: A very proper amendment. But I am rather old, don’t you think, to believe in eyes? I have reached the point where I don’t believe in much of anything except legs. And one cannot be too sure even of legs.

CAT: Legs are art, not literature.

BROOMSTICK: They were always intended to be.

CAT: They are still intended to be.

BOWL: All the more reason for saying no more about them. It is a new thing that the eyes of a poetess should bring us to this.

BROOMSTICK (Drily): Possibly. And yet it may not be so new, after all. (He pauses.) We are not living in the seventeenth century for nothing. (He pauses.) Moreover, just as the relations of man and moonlight, women and moonlight, man and mountains, women and waves, and so on, are undefined, so the relations of eyes and legs, lips and cheeks, and that kind of thing, are equally undefined. It is all part of the universal comedy, which the poets ignore, because they continue to believe in tragedy. You see tragedy in these eyes. They are capable of tragedy. Does the voice of tragedy dwell in this mouth?

BOWL: I was not thinking of that. I was thinking merely of the expression it gives to the portrait. That expression is vitally biographical.

BROOMSTICK: Vitally biographical? The book has the usual preface. Is that not biographical enough?

CAT: We shall come to that in time.

BOWL (Making a point): We had agreed to skip it, for the moment, and to form our own idea of Claire Dupray from her portrait, and from her poetry. That is what we are doing.

CAT: Bowl is an idealist, you know.

BROOMSTICK: An idealist has nothing to fear from a preface.

CAT: That she has heavy black hair, large eyes, capable of tragedy, as you say, which means, I hope, that they are brilliant and mysterious, for so I see them, and that her mouth is expressive, this seemed preface enough.

BROOMSTICK: It is the kind of preface you yourself would write and that is why you think it preface enough.

CAT (Offended): What do you mean?

BROOMSTICK (Putting him down): I assume that in what Bowl has been saying of this portrait he has been intending to derive from ink and paper a vivid impression of the sensibility of his poetess. You have seen only her beauty.

CAT (AS if justified): I make no bones about that. There is a special power in the poetry of a beauty.

BROOMSTICK: For you: yes.

CAT: For you, too.

BROOMSTICK (Maliciously): Pathos, perhaps; not power. But Bowl’s portrait is a failure.

BOWL: A failure?

BROOMSTICK (Sarcastically): You might have been describing one of the many dark-haired and dark-eyed Peloponnesians. And what you say of the expressive quality of the mouth has been trite for a long time.

BOWL: And true for a long time.