Ardilaun Vyse, a popular poet; and Cynicus Neere, an old bachelor.

Scene—A Smoking-Room.

Ardilaun. I can't think why we discuss it. It's as useless to expect sentiment from you as——

Cynicus. To import coals to Newcastle. Who hawks goods in a stocked market?

Ardilaun. One likes sympathy.

Cynicus. I sympathise profoundly; but talking about a leak doesn't stop it.

Ardilaun. This can't be stopped. It means the wreck of two lives—Letitia's and mine.

Cynicus. Together?

Ardilaun. Together! Why, the universe would be re-created! It is severment that ruins. There is she, brilliant, beautiful, famous, tied for life to a money-grubber on 'Change: a wretch who cuts the leaves of her books with his thumb, and snores over them like an apoplectic pug.

Cynicus. He earns his dose.

Ardilaun. Money again! That's all you think of—it's all my wife thinks about. Petty parsimonies, cramping retrenchments, harrowing details of household economy——

Cynicus. Very necessary, even in the menage of a popular poet.

Ardilaun. They needn't be flaunted. To come in and read your most brilliant stanzas to a woman who never looks up from darning——

Cynicus. Your socks?

Ardilaun. When you know of another who would listen to every word and criticise——

Cynicus. Pick holes, not mend them!

Ardilaun. Who would share your highest exaltations and lift you——

Cynicus. Off your feet, till you bashed your crown against the hard fact of orthodox opinion.

Ardilaun. What is opinion to souls the law of the higher intelligence has made twin?

Cynicus. A thorny briar, with twenty prickles to the rose.

Ardilaun. What were a thousand prickles to one such rose?

Cynicus. I concede, Letitia is too fine a prize to be lost for a scratch—a thousand scratches.

Ardilaun. Well said—now you speak like a man.

Cynicus. She must be grasped and all the little spikes allowed to probe their way through the skin. You can rise at cock-crow and salve your wounds with morning dew—you rival the lark sometimes, don't you?—you——

Ardilaun. Nothing to laugh at. I find my best inspirations at sunrise, when the first glow of day blushes through the trees.

Cynicus (scratching his chin and looking at the ceiling). Letitia sleeps till nine. Her inspirations blaze best in moonlight. At dawn her rest commences and is never broken—no, not even by the "apoplectic pug." He slinks off on tip-toe to his money-grubbing in the city.

Ardilaun. Does she work so hard?

Cynicus. Books like Letitia's are not written without mental strain. Poets may weave, like spiders, from their innermost, but authors grind.

Ardilaun. Noble woman! Yet she shows no signs of fatigue.

Cynicus. The "pug" again. Snacks before she goes out, snacks when she comes home; oysters and stout at eleven, by his orders. Saves the digestion and helps to recuperate, he thinks.

Ardilaun. But eating in the usual way——

Cynicus. Couldn't be done by genius; nothing so conventional.

Ardilaun. Me you put outside the pale?

Cynicus. Oh no; you've your vagaries, though not as to time. How about the vegetarian diet and distilled water?

Ardilaun. The simplicity of the philosophers.

Cynicus. Troublesome to keep going?

Ardilaun. Not so; my meals are perfect—fit for a king.

Cynicus. Your wife's recipes, I suppose? Our English cooks are dolts at vegetable dressing.

Ardilaun. They are. She superintends—she prefers cookpots to poetry. That is the hard part of it. Were it Letitia——

Cynicus. The vegetables might go to the——

Ardilaun. Nothing of the kind. A clever woman could master such trivial details in a trice.

Cynicus. And pen her books with a squint eye on the saucepan?

Ardilaun. You say she only works at night.

Cynicus. And your matutinal repast?

Ardilaun. My milk and lentils at eight—anyone could manage that——

Cynicus. And Letitia's coffee and roll in bed at nine, her dÉjeuner À la Fourchette at eleven, your lunch at one, her snack at four, your tea at five——

Ardilaun. Come, you're overdrawing it. We should at least have dinner together.

Cynicus. Yes; Letitia is what you call a flesh-eater and wine-bibber like myself. We'd have a good square meal, finishing up with some fine "fruity." I forgot; in the ideal household the "pug's" noted port would be conspicuous by its absence.

Ardilaun. Poets don't gamble to fill their cellars.

Cynicus. So they go empty. Poor Letitia!

Ardilaun. Letitia would prefer love to the rarest vintage that was ever pressed.

Cynicus. How about the machinery? The nectar of the gods won't drive a cog-wheel.

Ardilaun. I suppose I have machinery, as you call it?

Cynicus. Greased on special principles, too. Drop your principles and bang goes everything.

Ardilaun. Puns won't silver your moral bolus. You can't convince me.

Cynicus. Morally? I don't attempt to, but practically I can show you it is one thing to love flowers, rave over their colour and scent, and another to crack your spine in digging and hoeing, watering, slug-catching, and all the rest of it.

Ardilaun. You've shifted your premises.

Cynicus. Pardon me; instead of preaching I used the Kodak. Tableau: Two precious exotics; to right, the "pug," armed with spade and watering-pot; to left, your wife, darning-needle in hand, impaling slugs.

Ardilaun. Bosh! You're too irritating for words; I'm off. (Exit in a rage.)

Cynicus. To develop the negative, eh?