"
"Yet is it the heart that cries to me, my poet?" she asked him, softly,
"or just the lips?"
"Oh, both of them, most beautiful and inaccessible of goddesses." Then
Marlowe leaned toward her, laughing and shaking that disreputable red
head. "Still you are very foolish, in your latest incarnation, to be
wasting your rays upon carpet earls who will not outwear a century. Were
modesty not my failing, I repeat, I could name somebody who will last
longer. Yes, and--if, but I lacked that plaguey virtue--I would advise
you to go a-gypsying with that nameless somebody, so that two manikins
might snatch their little share of the big things that are eternal, just
as the butterfly fares intrepidly and joyously, with the sun for his
torch-boy, through a universe wherein thought cannot estimate the
unimportance of a butterfly, and wherein not even the chaste moon is
very important. Yes, certainly I would advise you to have done with this
vanity of courts and masques, of satins and fans and fiddles, this
dallying with tinsels and bright vapours; and very movingly I would
exhort you to seek out Arcadia, travelling hand in hand with that still
nameless somebody." And of a sudden the restless man began to sing.
Sang Kit Marlowe:
"Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
Woods or sleepy mountain yields.
"And we will sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals--"
But the girl shook her small, wise head decisively.
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