Page:Lolly Willowes - 1926.djvu/222

 she rated her own even higher, for she did not suppose that they had to be for ever jumping up and down to light the poet's cigarette; and blank verse flowed, flowed majestically, she understood, from his lips, whereas Titus dictated in prose, which was far harder to punctuate.

Nor did it flow. Titus was not feeling at his best. He hated small bothers, and of late he had been seethed alive in them. Every day something went wrong, some fiddle-faddle little thing. All his ingenuity was wasted in circumvention; he had none left for Fuseli.

Anyhow, dictation was only fit for oil-kings! He jumped up and dashed about the room with a fly-flap. Fly-flapping was a manly indoor sport, especially if one observed all the rules. The ceiling was marked out in squares like a chess-board, and while they stayed in their squares the flies could not be attacked. The triangle described by the blue vase, the pink vase, and the hanging lamp was a Yellowstone Park, and so was the King's Face, a difficult ruling, but Titus had decided that of two evils it was more tolerable that the royal countenance should be crawled over by flies than assaulted by the subject. All this from a left-handed adversary—the flies had nothing to complain of, in his