Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/585
anybody, but I won't have him jailed, if you won't play the part, I'll play it myself.
DECIMA: When I married him, I made him swear never to play with anybody but me, and well you know it.
NONA: Only this once, and in a part nobody can do anything with.
DECIMA: That is the way it begins and all the time you would be saying things the audience couldn't hear.
NONA: Septimus will break his oath and I have learnt the part. . . every line of it.
DECIMA: Septimus would not break his oath for anybody in the world.
NONA: There is one person in the world for whom he will break his oath.
DECIMA: What have you in your head now?
NONA: He will break it for me.
DECIMA: You are crazy.
NONA: Maybe I have my secrets.
DECIMA: What are you keeping back? Have you been sitting in corners with Septimus, giving him sympathy because of the bad wife he has and all the while he has sat there to have the pleasure of talking about me?
NONA: You think that you have his every thought because you are a devil.
DECIMA: Because I am a devil I have his every thought. You know how his own song runs. The man speaks first (singing):
"Put off that mask of burning gold
With emerald eyes."
and the woman answers:
"Oh no, my dear, you make so bold
To find if hearts be wild and wise
And yet not cold."
NONA: His every thought—that is a lie. He forgets all about you the moment you're out of his sight.
DECIMA: Then look what I carry under my bodice. This is a poem praising me, all my beauties one after another—eyes, hair, complexion, shape, disposition, mind—everything. And there are a great many verses to it. And here is a little one he gave me yesterday morning. I had turned him out of bed and he had to lie alone by himself.
NONA: Alone by himself!
DECIMA: And as he lay there alone, unable to sleep, he made it up, wishing that he were blind so as not to be troubled by looking at my beauty. Hear how it goes! (sings again):
O would that I were an old beggar
Without a friend on this earth
But a thieving rascally cur
A beggar blind from his birth;
Or anything else but a man
Lying alone on a bed
Remembering a woman's beauty,
Alone with a crazy head.