Beneath his hand his mouth is slain,
Beneath his hand his mouth is dead—’
“No: wait.” He skipped back up the page. Mrs. Wiseman listened restively, her brother with his customary quizzical phlegm.
“ ‘The Raven bleak and Philomel
Amid the bleeding trees were fixed,
His hoarse cry and hers were mixed
And through the dark their droppings fell
“Upon the red erupted rose,
Upon the broken branch of peach
Blurred with scented mouths, that each
To another sing, and close—’”
He read the entire poem through. “What do you make of it?” he asked.
“Mostly words,” the Semitic man answered promptly, “a sort of cocktail of words. I imagine you get quite a jolt from it, if your taste is educated to cocktails.”
“Well, why not?” Mrs. Wiseman said with fierce protectiveness. “Only fools require ideas in verse.”
“Perhaps so,” her brother admitted. “But there’s no nourishment in electricity, as you poets nowadays seem to believe.”
“Well, what would you have them write about, then?” she demanded. “There’s only one possible subject to write anything about. What is there worth the effort and despair of writing about, except love and death?”
“That’s the feminine of it. You’d better let art alone and stick to artists, as is your nature.”
“But women have done some good things,” Fairchild objected. “I’ve read—”
