“Away and beyond the point of pines,In a pleasant land where the glad grapes be,Purple and pendent on verdant vines,I know that my fate is awaiting me.”
What fate was to be hers? There was no joy in her eyes as she gazed. Mrs. Crozier was beside the table again before she roused herself from her trance.
“I’ve got it—just two sheets, two solitary sheets,” said Mona in triumph. “How long they have been in my case I don’t know. It is almost uncanny they should be there just when they’re most needed.”
“Providential, we should say out here,” was Kitty’s response. “Begin, please. Be sure you have the right date. It was—”
Mona had already written the date, and she interrupted Kitty with the words, “As though I could forget it!” All at once Kitty put a restraining hand on her arm.
“Wait—wait, you mustn’t write on that paper yet. Suppose you didn’t write the real wise thing—and only two sheets of paper and so much to say?”
“How right you always are!” said Mona, and took up one of the blank sheets which Kitty had just brought her.
Then she began to write. For a minute she wrote swiftly, nervously, and had nearly finished a page when Kitty said to her, “I think I had better see what you have written. I don’t think you are the best judge. You see, I have known him better than you for the last five years, and I am the best judge please, I mean it in the rightest, kindest way,” she added, as she saw Mona shrink. It was like hurting a child, and she loved children—so much. She had always a vision of children at her knee.
Silently Mrs. Crozier pushed the sheets towards her. Kitty read the page with a strange, eager look in her eyes. “Yes, that’s right as far as it goes,” she said. “It doesn’t gush. It’s natural. It’s you as you are now, not as you were then, of course.”
Again Mona bent over the paper and wrote till she had completed a page. Then Kitty looked over her shoulder and read what had been written. “No, no, no, that won’t do,” she exclaimed. “That won’t do at all. It isn’t in the way that will accomplish what we want. You’ve gone quite, quite wrong. I’ll do it. I’ll dictate it to you. I know exactly what to say, and we mustn’t make any mistake. Write, please—you must.”
Mona scratched out what had been written without a word. “I am waiting,” she said submissively.
“All right. Now we go on. Write. I’ll dictate.” “‘And look here, dearest,’” she began, but Mona stopped her.
“We do not say ‘look here’ in England. I would have said ‘and see.’”
“‘And see-dearest,’” corrected Kitty, with an accent on the last word, “‘while I was mad at you for the moment for breaking your promise—‘”
“In England we don’t say ‘mad’ in that connection,” Mona again interrupted. “We say ‘angry’ or ‘annoyed’ or ‘vexed.’” There was real distress in her tone.
“Now I’ll tell you what to do,” said Kitty cheerfully. “I’ll speak it, and you write it my way of thinking, and then when we’ve finished you will take out of the letter any words that are not pure, noble, classic English. I know what you mean, and you are quite right. Mr. Crozier never says ‘look here’ or ‘mad,’ and he speaks better than any one I ever heard. Now, we certainly must get on.”
After an instant she began again.
“—While I was angry at you a moment for breaking your promise, I cannot reproach you for it, because I, too, bet on the Derby, but I bet on a horse that you had said as much against as you could. I did it because you had very bad luck all this year and lost, and also last year, and I thought—”
For several minutes, with greater deliberation than was usual with her, Kitty dictated, and at the end of the letter she said, “I am, dearest, your—”
Here Mona sharply interrupted her. “If you don’t mind I will say that myself in my own way,” she said, flushing.
“Oh, I forgot for the moment that I was speaking for you!” responded Kitty, with a lurking, undermeaning in her voice. “I threw myself into it so. Do you think I’ve done the thing right?” she added.
With a direct, honest friendliness Mona looked into Kitty eyes. “You have said the exact right thing as to meaning, I am sure, and I can change an occasional word here and there to make it all conventional English.”
Kitty nodded. “Don’t lose a minute in copying it. We must get the letter back in his desk as soon as possible.”
As Mona wrote, Kitty sat with the envelope in her hand, alternately looking at it and into the distance beyond the point of pines. She was certain that she had found the solution of the troubles of Shiel and Mona Crozier, for Crozier would now have his fortune, and the return to his wife was a matter of course. Was she altogether sure? But yes, she was altogether sure. She remembered, with a sudden, swift plunge of blood in her veins, that early dawn when she bent over him as he lay beneath the tree, and as she kissed him in his sleep he had murmured, “My darling!” That had not been for her, though it had been her kiss which had stirred his dreaming soul to say the words. If they had only been meant for her, then—oh, then life would be so much easier in the future! If—if she could only kiss him again and he would wake and say—
She got to her feet with an involuntary exclamation. For an instant she had been lost in a world of her own, a world of the impossible.
“I almost thought I heard a step in the other room,” she said in explanation to Mona. Going to the door of Crozier’s room, she appeared to listen for a moment, and then she opened it.
“No, it is all right,” she said.
In another few minutes Mona had finished the letter. “Do you wish to read it again?” she asked Kitty, but not handing it to her.
“No, I leave the words to you. It was the right meaning I wanted in it,” she replied.
Suddenly Mona came to her and laid a hand on her arm. “You are wonderful—a wonderful, wise, beloved girl,” she said, and there were tears in her eyes.
Kitty gave the tiny fingers a spasmodic clasp, and said: “Quick, we must get them in!” She put the banknotes inside the sheets of paper, then hastily placed both in the envelope and sealed the envelope again.
“It’s just a tiny bit damp with the steam yet, but it will be all right in five minutes. How soiled the envelope is!” Kitty added. “Five years in and out of the desk, in and out of his pocket—but all so nice and unsoiled and sweet and bonny inside,” she added. “To say nothing of the bawbees, as Mr. Crozier calls money. Well, we are ready. It all depends on you now, Mrs. Crozier.”
“No, not all.”
“He used to be afraid of you; now you are afraid of him,” said Kitty, as though stating a commonplace.
There was no more shrewishness left in the little woman to meet this chastisement. The forces against her were too many. Loneliness and the long struggle to face the world without her man; the determination of this masterful young woman who had been so long a part of her husband’s life; and, more than all, a new feeling altogether—love, and the dependence a woman feels, the longing to find rest in strong arms, which comes with the first revelation of love, had conquered what Kitty had called her “bossiness.” She was now tremulous before the crisis which she must presently face. Pride in her fortune, in her independence, had died down in her. She no longer thought of herself as a woman especially endowed and privileged. She took her fortune now like a man; for she had been taught that a man could set her aside just because she had money, could desert her to be independent of it. It had been a revelation to her, and she was chastened of all the termagancy visible and invisible in her. She stood now before Kitty of “a humble and a contrite heart,” and made no reply at all to the implied challenge. Kitty, instantly sorry for what she had said, let it go at that. She was only now aware of how deeply her arrows had gone home.
As they stood silent there was a click at the gate. Kitty ran into Crozier’s room, thrust the letter into its pigeonhole in the desk, and in a moment was back again. In the garden the Young Doctor was holding Crozier in conversation, but watching the front door. So soon, however, as Kitty had shown herself, as she had promised, at the front door and then vanished, he turned Crozier towards the house again by an adroit word, and left him at the door-step.
Seeing who was inside the room Crozier hesitated, and his long face, with paleness added to its asceticism, took on a look which could have given no hope of happiness to Mona. It went to her heart as no look of his had ever gone. Suddenly she had a revelation of how little she had known of what he was, or what any man was or could be, or of those springs of nature lying far below the outer lives which move in orbits of sheltering convention. It is because some men and women are so sheltered from the storms of life by wealth and comfort that these piercing agonies which strike down to the uttermost depths so seldom reach them.
Shiel half turned away, not sullen, not morose, but with a strange apathy settled on him. He had once heard a man say, “I feel as though I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.” That was the way he felt now, for to be beaten in the game which you have played like a man yourself and have been fouled into an unchallenged defeat, without the voice of the umpire, is a fate which has smothered the soul of better men than Crozier.
Mona’s voice stopped him. “Do not go, Shiel,” she urged gently. “No, you must not go—I want fair-play from you, if nothing else. You must play the game with me. I want justice. I have to say some things I had no chance to say before, and I want to hear some things I have a right to hear. Indeed, you must play the game.”
He drew himself up. Not to be a sportsman, not to play the game—to accuse him of this would have brought him back from the edge of the grave.
“I’m not fit to-day. Let it be to-morrow, Mona,” was his hesitating reply; but he did not leave the doorway.
She shook her head and made a swift little childlike gesture towards him. “We are sure of to-day; we are not sure of to-morrow. One or the other of us might not be here to-morrow. Let us do to-day the thing that belongs to to-day.”
That note struck home, for indeed the black spirit which whispers to men in their most despairing hours to end it all had whispered to him.
“Let us do to-day the thing that belongs to to-day,” she had just said, and, strange to say, there shot into his mind words that belonged to the days when he went to church at Castlegarry and thought of a thousand things other than prayer or praise, but yet heard with the acute ears of the young, and remembered with the persistent memory of youth. “For the night cometh when no man can work,” were the words which came to him. He shuddered slightly. Suppose that this indeed was the beginning of the night! As she said, he must play the game—play it as Crozier of Lammis would have played it.
He stepped inside the room. “Let it be to-day,” he said.
“We may be interrupted here,” she replied. Courage came to her. “Let us talk in your own room,” she added, and going over she opened the door of it and walked in. The matured modesty of a lost five years did not cloak her actions now. She was a woman fighting for happiness, and she had been so beaten by the rods of scorn, so smothered by the dust of humiliation, that there had come to her the courage of those who would rather die fighting than in the lethargy of despair.
It was like her old self to take the initiative, but she did it now in so different a way—without masterfulness or assumption. It was rather like saying, “I will do what I know you wish me to do; I will lay all reserve aside for your sake; I will be bold because I love you.”
He shut the door behind them and motioned her to a chair.
“No, I will not sit,” she said. “That is too formal. You ask any stranger to sit. I am at home here, Shiel, and I will stand.”
“What was it you wanted to say, Mona?” he asked, scarcely looking at her.
“I should like to think that there was something you wished to hear,” she replied. “Don’t you want to know all that has happened since you left us—about me, about your brother, about your friends, about Lammis? I bought Lammis at the sale you ordered; it is still ours.” She gave emphasis to “ours.” “You may not want to hear all that has happened to me since you left, still I must tell you some things that you ought to know, if we are going to part again. You treated me badly. There was no reason why you should have left and placed me in the position you did.”
His head came up sharply and his voice became a little hard. “I told you I was penniless, and I would not live on you, and I could do nothing in England; I had no trade or profession. If I had said good-bye to you, you would probably have offered me a ticket to Canada. As I was a pauper I preferred to go with what I had out of the wreck—just enough to bring me here. But I’ve earned my own living since.”
“Penniless—just enough to bring you out here!” Her voice had a sound of honest amazement. “How can you say such a thing! You had my letter—you said you had my letter?”
“Yes, I had your letter,” he answered. “Your thoughtful brother brought it to me. You had told him all the dear womanly things you had said or were going to say to your husband, and he passed them on to me with the letter.”
“Never mind what he said to you, Shiel. It was what I said that mattered.” She was getting bolder every minute. The comedy was playing into her hands.
“You wrote in your letter the things he said to me,” he replied.
Her protest sounded indignantly real. “I said nothing in the letter I wrote you that any man would not wish to hear. Is it so unpleasant for a man who thinks he is penniless to be told that he has made the year’s income of a cabinet minister?”
“I don’t understand,” he returned helplessly.
“You talk as though you had never read my letter.
“I never have read your letter,” he replied in bewilderment.
Her face had the flush of honest anger. “You do not dare to tell me you destroyed my letter without reading it—that you destroyed all that letter contained simply because you no longer cared for your wife; because you wanted to be rid of her, wanted to vanish and never see her any more, and so go and leave no trace of yourself! You have the courage here to my face”—the comedy of the situation gained much from the mock indignation—she no longer had any compunctions—“to say that you destroyed my letter and what it contained—a small fortune it would be out here.”
“I did not destroy your letter, Mona,” was the embarrassed response.
“Then what did you do with it? Gave it to some one else to read—to some other woman, perhaps.”
He was really shocked and greatly pained. “Hush! You shall not say that kind of thing, Mona. I’ve never had anything to do with any woman but my wife since I married her.”
“Then what did you do with the letter?”
“It’s there,” he said, pointing to the high desk with the green baize top.
“And you say you have never read it?”
“Never.”
She raised her head with dainty haughtiness. “Then if you have still the same sense of honour that made you keep faith with the bookmakers—you didn’t run away from them!—read it now, here in my presence. Read it, Shiel. I demand that you read it now. It is my right. You are in honour bound—”
It was the only way. She dare not give him time to question, to suspect; she must sweep him along to conviction. She was by no means sure that there wasn’t a flaw in the scheme somewhere, something that would betray her; and she could hardly wait till it was over, till he had read the letter.
In a moment he was again near her with the letter in his hand.
“Yes, that’s it—that’s the letter,” she said, with wondering and reproachful eyes. “I remember the little scratchy blot from the pen on the envelope. There it is, just as I made it five years ago. But how disgracefully soiled the envelope is! I suppose it has been tossed about in your saddle-bag, or with your old clothes, and only kept to remind you day by day that you had a wife you couldn’t live with—kept as a warning never to think of her except to say, ‘I hate you, Mona, because you are rich and heartless, and not bigger than a pinch of snuff.’ That was the kind way you used to speak of her even when you were first married to her—contemptuously always in your heart, no matter what you said out loud. And the end showed it—the end showed it; you deserted her.”
He was so fascinated by the picture she made of passion and incensed declamation that he did not attempt to open the letter, and he wondered why there was such a difference between the effect of her temper on him now and the effect of it those long years ago. He had no feeling of uneasiness in her presence now, no sense of irritation. In spite of her tirade, he had a feeling that it didn’t matter, that she must bluster in her tiny teacup if she wanted to do so.
“Open the letter at once,” she insisted. “If you don’t, I will.” She made as though to take the letter from him, but with a sudden twist he tore open the envelope. The bank-notes fell to the floor as he took out the sheet inside. Wondering, he stooped to pick them up.
“Four thousand pounds!” he exclaimed, examining them. “What does it mean?”
“Read,” she commanded.
He devoured the letter. His eyes swam; then there rushed into them the flame which always made them illumine his mediaeval face like the light from “the burning bush.” He did not question or doubt, because he saw what he wished to see, which is the way of man. It all looked perfectly natural and convincing to him.
“Mona—Mona—heaven above and all the gods of hell and Hellas, what a fool, what a fool I’ve been!” he exclaimed. “Mona—Mona, can you forgive your idiot husband? I didn’t read this letter because I thought it was going to slash me on the raw—on the raw flesh of my own lacerating. I simply couldn’t bear to read what your brother said was in the letter. Yet I couldn’t destroy it, either. It was you. I had to keep it. Mona, am I too big a fool to be your husband?”
He held out his arms with a passionate exclamation. “I asked you to kiss me yesterday, and you wouldn’t,” she protested. “I tried to make you love me yesterday, and you wouldn’t. When a woman gets a rebuff like that, when—”
She could not bear it any longer. With a cry of joy she was in his arms.
After a moment he said, “The best of all was, that you—you vixen, you bet on that Derby and won, and—”
“With your money, remember, Shiel.”
“With my money!” he cried exultingly. “Yes, that’s the best of it—the next best of it. It was your betting that was the best of all—the best thing you ever did since we married, except your coming here.”
“It’s in time to help you, too—with your own money, isn’t it?”
He glanced at his watch. “Hours—I’m hours to the good. That crowd—that gang of thieves—that bunch of highwaymen! I’ve got them—got them, and got a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, too, to start again at home, at Lammis, Mona, back on the—but no, I’m not sure that I can live there now after this big life out here.”
“I’m not so sure, either,” Mona replied, with a light of larger understanding in her eyes. “But we’ll have to go back and stop the world talking, and put things in shape before we come here to stay.”
“To stay here—do you mean that?” he asked eagerly.
“Somewhere in this big land,” she replied softly; “anyhow, to stay here till I’ve grown up a little. I wasn’t only small in body in the old days, I was small in mind, Shiel.”
“Anyhow, I’ve done with betting and racing, Mona. I’ve just got time left—I’m only thirty-nine—to start and really do something with myself.”
“Well, start now, dear man of Lammis. What is it you have to do before twelve o’clock to-night?” “What is it? Why, I have to pay over two thousand of this,”—he flourished the banknotes—“and even then I’ll still have two thousand left. But wait—wait. There was the original fifty pounds. Where is that fifty pounds, little girl alive? Out with it. This is the profit. Where is the fifty you staked?” His voice was gay with raillery.
She could look him in the face now and prevaricate without any shame or compunction at all. “That fifty pounds—that! Why, I used it to buy my ticket for Canada. My husband ought to pay my expenses out to him.”
He laughed greatly. All Ireland was rioting in his veins now. He had no logic or reasoning left. “Well, that’s the way to get into your old man’s heart, Mona. To think of that! I call it tact divine. Everything has spun my way at last. I was right about that Derby, after all. It was in my bones that I’d make a pot out of it, but I thought I had lost it all when Flamingo went down.”
“You never know your luck—you used to say that, Shiel.”
“I say it again. Come, we must tell our friends—Kitty, her mother, and the Young Doctor. You don’t know what good friends they have been to me, mavourneen.”
“Yes, I think I do,” said Mona, opening the door to the outer room.
Then Crozier called with a great, cheery voice—what Mona used to call his tally-ho voice. Mrs. Tynan appeared, smiling. She knew at a glance what had happened. It was so interesting that she could even forgive Mona.
“Where’s Kitty?” asked Crozier, almost boisterously.
“She has gone for a ride with John Sibley,” answered Mrs. Tynan.
“Look, there she is!” said Mona, laying a hand on Crozier’s arm, and pointing with the other out over the prairie.
Crozier looked out towards the northwestern horizon, and in the distance was a woman riding as hard as her horse could go, with a man galloping hard after her. It seemed as though they were riding into the sunset.
“She’s riding the horse you won that race with years ago when you first came here, Mr. Crozier,” said Mrs. Tynan. “John Sibley bought it from Mr. Brennan.”
Mona did not see the look which came into Crozier’s face as, with one hand shading his eyes and the other grasping the banknotes which were to start him in life again, independent and self-respecting, he watched the girl riding on and on, ever ahead of the man.
It was at that moment the Young Doctor entered the room, and he distracted Mona’s attention for a moment. Going forward to him Mona shook him warmly by the hand. Then she went up to Mrs. Tynan and kissed her.
“I would like to kiss your daughter too, Mrs. Tynan,” Mona said.... “What are you looking at so hard, Shiel?” she presently added to her husband.
He did not turn to her. His eyes were still shaded by his hand.
“That horse goes well yet,” he said in a low voice. “As good as ever—as good as ever.”
“He loves horses so,” remarked Mona, as though she could tell Mrs. Tynan and the Young Doctor anything about Shiel Crozier which they did not know.
“Kitty rides well, doesn’t she?” asked Mrs. Tynan of Crozier.
“What a pair—girl and horse!” Crozier exclaimed. “Thoroughbred—absolutely thoroughbred!”
Kitty had ridden away with her heart’s secret, her very own, as she thought: but Shiel Crozier knew—the man that mattered knew.
Golden, all golden, save where there was a fringe of trees at a watercourse; save where a garden, like a spot of emerald, made a button on the royal garment wrapped across the breast of the prairie. Above, making for the trees of the foothills far away, a golden eagle floated, a prairie-hen sped affrighted from some invisible thing; and in the far distance a railway train slipped down the plain like a serpent making for a covert in the first hills of the first world that ever was.
At a casual glance the vast plain seemed uninhabited, yet here and there were men and horses, tiny in the vastness, but conquering. Here and there also—for it was July—a haymaker sharpened his scythe, and the sound came singing through the air radiant and stirring with life.
Seated in the shade of a clump of trees a girl sat with her chin in her hands looking out over the prairie, an intense dreaming in her eyes. Her horse was tethered near by, but it scarcely made a sound. It was a horse which had once won a great race, with an Irish gentleman on his back. Long time the girl sat absorbed, her golden colour, her brown-gold hair in harmony with the universal stencil of gold. With her eyes drowned in the distance, she presently murmured something to herself, and as she did so the eyes deepened to a nameless umber tone, deeper than gold, warmer than brown; such a colour as only can be found in a jewel or in a leaf the frost has touched.
The frost had touched the soul which gave the colour to the eyes of the girl. Yet she seemed all summer, all glow and youth and gladness. Her voice was golden, too, and the words which fell from her lips were as though tuned to the sound of falling water. The tone of the voice would last when the gold of all else became faded or tarnished. It had its origin in the soul:
“Whereaway goes my lad? Tell me, has he gone alone?Never harsh word did I speak; never hurt I gave;Strong he was and beautiful; like a heron he has flownHereaway, hereaway will I make my grave.”
The voice lingered on the words till it trailed away into nothing, like the vanishing note of a violin which seems still to pulse faintly after the sound has ceased.
“But he did not go alone, and I have not made my grave,” the girl said, and raised her head at the sound of footsteps. With an effort she emerged from the half-trance in which she had been, and smiled at a man hastening towards her.
“Dear bully, bulbous being—how that word ‘bully’ would have, made her cringe!” she said as the man ambled nearer. He could not go as fast as his mind urged him.
“I’ve got news—news, news!” he exclaimed, wading through his own perspiration to where she sat. “I can guess what it is,” the girl remarked smilingly, as she reached out a hand to him, but remained seated. “It’s a real, live baby born to Lydia, wife of Methuselah, the woman also being of goodly years. It is, isn’t it.”
“The fattest, finest, most ‘scrumpshus’ son of all the ages that ever—”
Kitty laughed happily and very whimsically. “Like none since Moses was found among the bulrushes! Where was this one found, and what do you intend to call him—Jesse, after his ‘pa’?”
“No—nothing so common. He’s to be called Shiel—Shiel Crozier Bulrush, that’s to be his name.”
The face of the girl became a shade pensive now. “Oh! And do you think you can guarantee that he will be worth the name? Do you never think what his father is?”
“I’m starting him right with that name. I can do so much, anyway,” laughed the imperturbable one. “And Mrs. Bulrush, after her great effort—how is she?
“Flying—simply flying. Earth not good enough for her. Simply flying. But here—here is more news. Guess what—it’s for you. I’ve just come from the post office, and they said there was an English letter for you, so I brought it.”
He handed it over. She laid it in her lap and waited as though for him to go.
“Can’t I hear how he is? He’s the best man that ever crossed my path,” he said.
“It happens to be in his wife’s, not his, handwriting—did ever such a scrap of a woman write so sprawling a hand!” she replied, holding the letter up.
“But she’ll let us know in the letter how Crozier is, won’t she?”
Kitty had now recovered herself, and slowly she opened the envelope and took out the letter. As she did so something fluttered to the ground.
Jesse Bulrush picked it up. “That looks nice,” he said, and he whistled in surprise. “It’s a money-draft on a bank.”
Kitty, whose eyes were fixed on the big, important handwriting, answered calmly and without apparently looking, as she took the paper from his hand: “Yes, it’s a wedding present—five hundred dollars to buy what I like best for my home. So she says.”
“Mrs. Crozier, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Well, that’s magnificent. What will you do with it?”
Kitty rose and held out her hand. “Go back to your flying partner, happy man, and ask her what she would do with five hundred dollars if she had it.”
“She’d buy her lord and master a present with it, of course,” he answered.
“Good-bye, Mr. Rolypoly,” she responded, laughing. “You always could think of things for other people to do; and have never done anything yourself until now. Good-bye, father.”
When he was gone and out of sight her face changed. With sudden anger she crushed and crumpled up the draft for five hundred in her hand. “‘A token of affection from both!’” she exclaimed, quoting from the letter. “One lone leaf of Irish shamrock from him would—”
She stopped. “But he will send a message of his own,” she continued. “He will—he will. Even if he doesn’t, I’ll know that he remembers just the same. He does—he does remember.”
She drew herself up with an effort, and, as it were, shook herself free from the memories which dimmed her eyes.
Not far away a man was riding towards the clump of trees where she was. She saw, and hastened to her horse.
“If I told John all I feel he’d understand. I believe he always has understood,” she added with a far-off look.
The draft was still crushed in her hand when she mounted the beloved horse, whose name now was Shiel.
Presently she smoothed out the crumpled paper. “Yes, I’ll take it; I’ll put it by,” she murmured. “John will keep on betting. He’ll be broke some day and he’ll need it, maybe.”
A moment later she was riding hard to meet the man who, before the wheat-harvest came, would call her wife.
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:And I was very lucky—worse luck!Any man as is a man has to have one viceGod help the man that’s afraid of his own wife!He saw what he wished to see, which is the way of manHer moral standard had not a multitude of delicate punctiliosLaw’s delays outlasted even the memory of the crime committedSearchers after excuses for ungoverned instincts and actsSensitive souls, however, are not so many as to crowd each otherShe looked too gay to be goodTelling the unnecessary truthThey had seen the world through the bottom of a tumblerWhat isn’t never was to those that never knew