knock something else
into their heads. You can't do it by facts. There aren't many facts
just now that aren't shameful. Why can't you let me do it by poetry?"

Madame Beattie stopped in the street and gazed up at the bright heaven.
She was remembering how the stars looked in Italy when she was young and
sure her voice would sound quite over the world. She seldom challenged
the stars now, they moved her so, in an almost terrible way. What had
she made of life, they austerely asked her, she who had been driven by
them to love and all the excellencies of youth? But then, in answer, she
would ask them what they had done for her.

"Jeff," said she, "you couldn't do it in a million years. They'll do
anything for me, because I bring their own homes to them, but they
couldn't make themselves over, even for me."

"They like me," said Jeff, "for some mysterious reason."

"They like you because I've told them to."

"I don't believe it." But in his heart he did.

"Jeff," said she, "life isn't a matter of fact, it's a matter of
feeling. You can't persuade men and women born in Italy and Greece and
Syria and Russia that they're happy in this little bare town. It doesn't
smell right to them. Their hearts are somewhere else. And they want
nothing so much in the world as to get a breath from there or hear a
story or see somebody that's lived there. Lived--not stayed in a
_pension_."

"Do they feel so when they've seen their sisters and cousins and aunts
carved up into little pieces there?" Jeff asked scoffingly. But she was
hypnotising him, too. He could believe they did.

"What have you to offer 'em, Jeff, besides wages and a prospect of not
being assassinated? That's something, but by God! it isn't everything."
She swore quite simply because out in the night even in the straight
street of a New England town she felt like it and was carelessly willing
to abide by the chance of God's objecting.

"But I don't see," said Jeff, "why you won't let me have my try at it."
He was waiting for her to signify her readiness to go on, and now she
did.

"Because now, Jeff, they do think you're a god. If they saw you trying
to produce the Merchant of Venice they'd be bored and they wouldn't
think so any more."

"Have you any objection," said Jeff, "to my trying to produce the
Merchant of Venice with English-speaking children of foreigners?"

"Not a grain," said Madame Beattie cordially. "There's your chance. Or
you can get up a pagean