Page:Wildwildheart00reesiala.pdf/98

“And so you’re presuming that ‘this chap,’ as you call him, was one of the lemonade brigade.”

“I’ll bet he was.”

“You’ve made rather a bad shot this time. The man who wrote these poems happens to have died from the effects of what you’d call manliness.”

“Drink?”

She nodded.

“He died when he was only forty-seven from tuberculosis—but the disease was brought on by dissipation.”

“Is that true?”

“Quite true.”

“And he wrote beautiful things?”

“Very beautiful things—but he lived and died in poverty and squalor—a hopeless drunkard.”

“All right,” he said. “You’ve scored. Read me something he wrote, and I’ll tell you what I think of it.”

“That’ll be worth hearing, won’t it?” she observed sarcastically. But her sarcasm left him unscathed.

“You’ve got to prove to me he was a poet.”

“I’ve proved he was a man by saying he was a drunkard?”

“Well, I’d rather listen to a man who’d lived hard, than to a mother’s darling. There—read that!”

He opened the book at random, and pointed to the head of the page.

“You have a very commanding way with you, haven’t you?” she asked, again with the little touch of dryness in her voice.

“Go on,” he answered.

And so Ann, with a little smile, “went on.”