When they were in the vestibule Miss Gordon turned to Osborne, and said,--
'Why did you take that man's number, and why did you give him a sovereign?'
'You told me the other evening I was a poet. I mean to try to be a poet now and then; and the first thing I shall write will be "A Sonnet to Hansom Cab No. 1136." Does that answer both questions?'
'But poets are never prudent; and when a poet falls in--'
They had gained the dining-room and sat down.
'When a poet falls in a hansom, why, you cannot expect him to peddle like a second-hand-clothes dealer.'
'Still I think the sovereign too much. How much a year have you?'
'About fifteen hundred, out of money recently left me,' he answered. He thought: 'What other girl in all the world would ask a man such a question under the circumstances?'
'Oh, I did not think you had so much! A bachelor with fifteen hundred a year ought not to wear such clumsy clothes and such long hair. You must get your hair shortened, wear a dark-blue frock-coat made by a good man, and an Oxford-blue tie. Blue suits you. I don't insist on patent-leather boots and gaiters, but they make an improvement. Your dress and hair led me to think you had not more than four or five hundred a year. You'd look very well in evening dress. All you light-bearded, high-foreheaded, square-faced, light-haired men look well in evening dress. My horror is a dark man--a man with black hair, a low forehead, heavy eyebrows, and black hair all over his face--in an open waistcoat and tailed coat. He looks as if the black of his coat had crawled up his poll and run down his face.'
'No, thank you. I never eat potato with sole. The idea is barbarous. Have you never observed that potato and sole are very like in flavour? They are, and the idea of drowning two delicate flavours in one another is atrocious. It would be like helping seakale and vegetable-marrow as fish and vegetable. The art of eating is in its infancy.'
'All the world is made of my joy,' thought Osborne. 'This great room, these bright tables, these polite waiters--all are made of my joy. My joy lifts the desolation of winter from the land, and floods the world with the warm level sunshine of evening. My joy, my glory, my fate, my love! My Jove! What were all the argosies of Hamburg or of Venice compared to you? What are all the riches of London compared to you? The value of riches is in spending them; this joy I have neither diminishes nor changes. It builds heavens above the skies, and glorifies the sordid things of earth.'