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The woman murmured: “Eh, you are luckier than I. I had a son. He was borne of my anguish, he was fed and tended by me, and he was dependent on me in all things.” She said, with a half-sob, “My poet, he was so little and so helpless! Now he is dead.”

“My dear, my dear!” he cried, and he took both her hands. “I also had a son. He would have been a man by this.”

They stood thus for a while. And then he smiled.

“I ask your pardon. I had forgotten that you hate to touch my hands. I know–they are too moist and flabby. I always knew that you thought that. Well! Hamnet died. I grieved. That is a trivial thing to say. But you also have seen your own flesh lying in a coffin so small that even my soft hands could lift it. So you will comprehend. To-day I find that the roughest winds abate with time. Hatred and self-seeking and mischance and, above all, the frailties innate in us–these buffet us for a while, and we are puzzled, and we demand of God, as Job did, why is this permitted? And then as the hair dwindles, the wit grows.”

“Oh, yes, with age we take a slackening hold upon events; we let all happenings go by more lightly; and we even concede the universe not to be under any actual bond to be intelligible. Yes, that is true. But is it gain, my poet? for I had thought it to be loss.”

“With age we gain the priceless certainty that sorrow and injustice are ephemeral. Solvitur ambulando, my dear. I have attested this merely by living long enough. I, like any other man of my years, have in my day known more or less every grief which the world breeds; and each maddened me in turn, as each was duly salved by time; so that to-day their ravages vex me no more than do the bee-stings I got when I was an urchin. To-day I grant the world to be composed of muck and sunshine intermingled; but, upon the whole, I find the sunshine more pleasant to look at, and–greedily, because my time for sightseeing is not very long–I stare at it. And I hold Judith’s creed to be the best of all imaginable creeds–that if we do nothing very wrong, all human imbroglios, in some irrational and quite incomprehensible fashion, will be straightened to our satisfaction. Meanwhile, you also voice a tonic truth–this universe of ours, and, reverently speaking, the Maker of this universe as well, is under no actual bond to be intelligible in dealing with us.” He laughed at this season and fell into a lighter tone. “Do I preach like a little conventicle-attending tradesman? Faith, you must remember that when I talk gravely Judith listens as if it were an oracle discoursing. For Judith loves me as the wisest and the best of men. I protest her adoration frightens me. What if she were to find me out?”

“I loved what was divine in you,” the woman answered.

“Oddly enough, that is the perfect truth! And when what was divine in me had burned a sufficiency of incense to your vanity, your vanity’s owner drove off in a fine coach and left me to die in a garret. Then Judith came. Then Judith nursed and tended and caressed me–and Judith only in all the world!–as once you did that boy you spoke of. Ah, madam, and does not sorrow sometimes lie awake o’ nights in the low cradle of that child? and sometimes walk with you by day and clasp your hand–much as his tiny hand did once, so trustingly, so like the clutching of a vine–and beg you never to be friends with anything save sorrow? And do you wholeheartedly love those other women’s boys–who did not die? Yes, I remember. Judith, too, remembered. I was her father, for all that I had forsaken my family to dance Jack-pudding attendance on a fine Court lady. So Judith came. And Judith, who sees in play-writing just a very uncertain way of making money–Judith, who cannot tell a B from a bull’s foot,–why, Judith, madam, did not ask, but gave, what was divine.”