' Toothache,' said Sybil promptly. ' I had three minutes' toothache yesterday, and was miserable.'
' Painless extraction.'
' But not the courage for extraction,' said she. ' I always think that extraction is at the root of it. One can get along all right with what one has not got; what one cannot do is to part with something that one has which gives pain.'
Mrs. Brancepeth tapped with the handle of her fork on the table.
' This is irrelevant,' she said; ' the question before the house is the power of money.'
' Dear Mrs. Brancepeth,' said Sybil, ' please don't let us discuss; let us babble. “ In a little while our lips are dumb,” as some depressing poet says. Poets are so often depressing.'
' Sybil is the most prosaic poet I know,' said Charlie. ' She casts her thought really in the mould of poetry, and before it is cold she hammers it to prose. She is the only person I know who has the romantic temperament and is ashamed of it.'
' Not ashamed of it,' cried she; ' but it is not current coin. I hammer the metal into currency. And he calls me prosaic.'
The ice was thin here, so thought Mrs. Brancepeth.
' Everyone has the same difficulty,' she said. ' One has either to hammer one's poetry into prose before it is current or trick out one's prose into poetry. The raw product of any of us—that is what it comes to—does not pass.'
' Ah, but what is the raw product?' said Charlie. ' If one knew, one would use it. ' But no one knows about himself. “ Know thyself ”—the first of mottoes, and, like all mottoes, impossible to act upon.'
' If you know other people, it is a good working basis about one's self,' said Sybil; ' one is very average—that is the important thing to remember.'
