"Ah no, no; not in retrospect. I remain their ideal, and all that, of course. They cherish the thought of me. They see the world in terms of me. But I am an inspiration, not an obsession; a glow, not a blight."
"You don't believe in the love that corrodes, the love that ruins?"
"No," laughed Zuleika.
"You have never dipped into the Greek pastoral poets, nor sampled the Elizabethan sonneteers?"
"No, never. You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself."
"Yet often you talk as though you had read rather much. Your way of speech has what is called 'the literary flavour'."
"Ah, that is an unfortunate trick which I caught from a writer, a Mr. Beerbohm, who once sat next to me at dinner somewhere. I can't break myself of it. I assure you I hardly ever open a book. Of life, though, my experience has been very wide. Brief? But I suppose the soul of man during the past two or three years has been much as it was in the reign of Queen Elizabeth and of—whoever it was that reigned over the Greek pastures. And I daresay the modern poets are making the same old silly distortions. But forgive me," she added gently, "perhaps you yourself are a poet?"
"Only since yesterday," answered the Duke (not
