CAT (Like a knowing person): This is really very promising; but not for Broomstick, I’m afraid.

BROOMSTICK: There might be some advantage in getting along.

BOWL: Shall I read another?

BROOMSTICK (Striking the floor with his cane): Provided I select it.

BOWL: Nothing would please me more.

He hands the book to Broomstick, who refers to the index at the back.

BROOMSTICK (With the hopeful manner of one consulting an index): The Shadow in the Trees.

BOWL: That is the one I read you a moment ago, the one beginning, “In the movement of trees, I find my own agitation.”

BROOMSTICK (With disgust): An index is full of pit-falls.

CAT: Why do you say that? I thought The Shadow in the Trees rather lovely.

BROOMSTICK (Energetically): Pshaw! And imagine Bowl’s thinking it new. Only because he wanted to think well of his poetess. She is young. Therefore she is new. Or therefore her poetry is young. That is one of the most persistent of all fallacies. Her poetry is young if her spirit is young — or whatever it is that poetry springs from. Not otherwise. This emotional waste, like the first poem, the one about twilight, this stale monism like The Shadow of the Trees, this sophisticated green, green, green — it is all thirty years old at the least. Thirty years at the very least. I might even put it in the last century. But aside from the poems we have actually heard — and I daresay the book is full of others just like them — what I hold against Claire Dupray, above everything else, is just that she is not herself in her day. To be herself she must be free. She looks free (looking at the portrait). But she is not free in spirit, and therefore her portrait fails.

BOWL: Free from what? I regarded The Shadow in the Trees as an instance of good seventeenth century work. And Le Bouquet seemed fairly advanced. Such things are not myths.

BROOMSTICK: The most fascinating myths in the world. To be free, Claire Dupray must be as free from to-day as from yesterday.

CAT: Rather difficult.

BROOMSTICK: Indescribably so. Look at people the world over. The extent and degree of imitation is appalling.

CAT: Necessarily, as a matter of convenience.

BROOMSTICK: Oh, but convenience is impossible in poetry. It is bad enough that Claire Dupray imitates at all. But it is fatal that she imitates the point of view and the feelings of a generation ago. Let her portrait be ever so charming. When all is said and done, she is a poetess in the old-maidenly sense of the word, not the brilliant and vivid creature you conceive her to be.

BOWL: In what year was her book published?

Broomstick examines the title page.

BROOMSTICK: In sixteen hundred and sixty.

CAT: If Bowl was right in supposing her to be twenty-two then, she would be twenty-nine or thirty now.

Cat makes a wry face. Bowl seems shocked. Broomstick turns a page or two.