the novelist of course understood it, and smiled, but with no mirth.
"Let me have your Sophocles," were the visitor's next words.
Reardon offered him a volume of the Oxford Pocket Classics.
"I prefer the Wunder, please."
"It's gone, my boy."
"Gone?"
"Wanted a little cash."
Biffen uttered a sound in which remonstrance and sympathy were blended.
"I'm sorry to hear that; very sorry. Well, this must do. Now, I want to know how you scan this chorus in the 'Oedipus Rex.'"
Reardon took the volume, considered, and began to read aloud with metric emphasis.
"Choriambics, eh?" cried the other. "Possible, of course; but treat them as Ionics a minore with an anacrusis, and see if they don't go better."
He involved himself in terms of pedantry, and with such delight that his eyes gleamed. Having delivered a technical lecture, he began to read in illustration, producing quite a different effect from that of the rhythm as given by his friend. And the reading was by no means that of a pedant, rather of a poet.
For half an hour the two men talked Greek metres as if they lived in a world where the only hunger known could be satisfied by grand or sweet cadences. . . .
Biffen was always in dire poverty, and lived in the oddest places; he had seen harder trials than even Reardon himself. The teaching by which he partly lived was of a kind quite unknown to the respectable tutorial world.
