Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/345

Rh in vain that she implored him, with tears in her eyes, to fall in love with some other woman. She, she alone, he said, must be his inspiration; but as the domesticated muse is too often a muse of exquisite silence, too happy to sing its happiness, this lawful passion, which might otherwise have been turned to account, was unproductive too.

"And such a pretty woman," said the editor sympathetically. Of another happier case of domestic hallucination, he made the remark: "Says he owes it all to his wife! and you never saw such a plain woman in your life."

"How do you know she is plain?" I asked; "mayn't it be that the husband's sense of beauty is finer than yours? Do you think all beauty is for all men? or that the beauty all can see is best worth seeing?"

And then we spoke the words of wisdom and wit which I have written in ebony on the lintel of this little house of words. He who would write to live must talk to write, and I confess that I took up this point with my friend, and continued to stick to it, no doubt to his surprise, because I had at the moment some stardust on the subject nebulously streaming and circling through my mind, which I was anxious to shape into something of an ordered world. So I talked not to hear myself speak, but to hear myself think, always, I will anticipate the malicious reader in saying, an operation of my mind of delightful unexpectedness.

"Why! you're actually thinking," chuckles one's brain to itself, "go on. Dance while the music's playing," and so the tongue goes dancing with pretty partners of words, till suddenly one's brain gives a sigh, the wheels begin to slow down, and music and dancing stop together, till some chance influence, a sound, a face, a flower, how or whence we know not, comes to wind it up again.

Rh