BROOMSTICK: If it has been true for a long time, then I doubt if it is true any longer. The fact remains that your young poetess is an old poetess.

BOWL (Querulously): Ought her hair to be cropped?

BROOMSTICK: Unquestionably. Something of the sort.

CAT: Adieu, Dupray!

BROOMSTICK: I do not insist on the cropped hair.

CAT: But on something of the sort. Poor Claire!

BROOMSTICK: YOU judge her poetry by her portrait. Very well. I judge her portrait by her poetry.

BOWL: YOU are prejudiced by the cant of the moment that she should be of her day.

BROOMSTICK: That is far from being the cant of the moment. It will still be the cant of the moment in the eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth century, too.

BOWL: Broomstick, it galls me to agree with you. If I submit, will you go no farther?

BROOMSTICK: I shall go as far as possible. Take the book again.

He hands the book to Bowl.

Would it have any effect if she wore black pendants in her ears?

It should have. Test her poetry by that. They are wearing black pendants, you know.

Cat snatches the book out of Bowl’s hands.

CAT: Would it have any effect?

He laughs heartily.

Confound it, Bowl! What was that poem about? The incessant momentum that tranquillizes because of the knowledge that it is immortal. Tranquillity and long, black pendants!

Bowl recovers the book from him.

BOWL: AS you like. My portrait is not a failure. Broomstick is right. A poetess should be of her day. But he is thinking of the poetess of forty-two: the sophisticated poetess. I am thinking of the unsophisticated poetess of twenty-two. If she happens to look like one of the dark-haired and dark-eyed Peloponnesians, that is not a rococo pose. It is an unaffected disclosure of her relationship.

CAT: Dupray returns, a little.

BOWL: And besides, Broomstick, what you mean, no doubt, by being of one’s day is being one’s self in one’s day.

BROOMSTICK: Well, Bowl, I submit to that, provided you, in turn, go no farther.

BOWL: Only to the extent of saying that Claire Dupray is simply herself in this portrait. It is true that she is not of the long, black pendant type. Nevertheless, she is of her day, in the sense in which you used that phrase.

CAT (Succulently): And I may be tempted by her again?

BOWL: In the long run, you would have been tempted by her regardless of these, or any other, considerations; so that your question is not honest.

CAT (Brazenly): It is honest enough. I am still a little harrowed by the poem on twilight.

BROOMSTICK: It haunts my own mind.

BOWL (To Cat): You said that there was a special power in the poetry of a beauty.

CAT (Alarmed): I said it. But I am not so certain of the beauty now.

BOWL: Then let me see.

He turns over the pages of the book rapidly.

Banal Sojourn. Old Catamaran — an amazing thing in the way it designs the catamaran on the surface of the sea: one of the poems in which by the description of the thing seen, she makes an image of the greatest intensity. Nothing in nature could have revealed what her imagination and sensibility have revealed. How true that is to my conception of Claire Dupray! She is beautiful. Her poems are beautiful. Here are similar poems: Les Dahlias — The Dahlias — What an extraordinary effect one gets from seeing things as they are, that is to say: from looking at ordinary things intensely!