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OORE (handing Barker a cigar): A cigar is welcome after reading; the spell of the Corona enjoins silence, but we may listen without losing any of the fragrance if the comment be favourable. Mine will provoke certainly no argument in you; you may even be glad to hear that the thought that returned to me again and again was: a dramatist's play, without trace of the novel, the poem, or the sonnet in it. Few are faithful to one literary form chosen from the beginning. Even Ibsen was a transgressor; he wrote some poems. Pater! Of course, there is Pater—like you, an exemplar of literary fidelity, his genius saving Marius again and again from drifting into the novel; and in Imaginary Portraits he was not less true to his genius, suave and punctilious—


 * Then you like the play you have just heard better than—

Yes, better than The Voyse's Inheritance, better than The Madras House, and better than—


 * I shall not take it as a compliment if you like my new play better than Waste, which you did not like at all. I gave it to you to read when I was lying stricken with typhoid fever in a Dublin lodging.

And every evening I read an act and every morning I came to tell you how much I admired the construction, the dialogue, and the characters.


 * But you found faults.

About one incident in the play my feelings cannot change.

very one from which the action of the play springs.
 * And the incident to which you take exception is the


 * No, Barker, I do not take exception to the incident from which the action of the play springs, but to the shrubbery in which it occurs. I can understand a pursuit through a garden, a terrace, or a park, but not through laurels, a shrub so gloomy that if there had been any in the vale of Menalus, Pan's hooves would