oquent
with desire.'

"How to keep the flame-winged lute-player with his dumb eloquence of
desire? To feast him was to lose him. Their love for each other was a
great love. Their granaries were overflowing with plenitude; yet they
wanted to keep the sharp famine-edge of their love undulled.

"Nor were they lean little fledglings theorizing on the threshold of
Love. They were robust and realized souls. They had loved before,
with others, in the days before they met; and in those days they had
throttled Love with caresses, and killed him with kisses, and buried him
in the pit of satiety.

"They were not cold wraiths, this man and woman. They were warm human.
They had no Saxon soberness in their blood. The colour of it was
sunset-red. They glowed with it. Temperamentally theirs was the French
joy in the flesh. They were idealists, but their idealism was Gallic.
It was not tempered by the chill and sombre fluid that for the English
serves as blood. There was no stoicism about them. They were Americans,
descended out of the English, and yet the refraining and self-denying of
the English spirit-groping were not theirs.

"They were all this that I have said, and they were made for joy, only
they achieved a concept. A curse on concepts! They played with logic,
and this was their logic.--But first let me tell you of a talk we had
one night. It was of Gautier's Madeline de Maupin. You remember the
maid? She kissed once, and once only, and kisses she would have no
more. Not that she found kisses were not sweet, but that she feared with
repetition they would cloy. Satiety again! She tried to play without
stakes against the gods. Now this is contrary to a rule of the game the
gods themselves have made. Only the rules are not posted over the table.
Mortals must play in order to learn the rules.

"Well, to the logic. The man and the woman argued thus: Why kiss once
only? If to kiss once were wise, was it not wiser to kiss not at all?
Thus could they keep Love alive. Fasting, he would knock forever at
their hearts.

"Perhaps it was out of their heredity that they achieved this unholy
concept. The breed will out and sometimes most fantastically. Thus
in them did cursed Albion array herself a scheming wanton, a bold,
cold-calculating, and artful hussy. After all, I do not know. But this
I know: it was out of their inordinate desire for joy that they forewent
joy.

"As he said (I read it long afterward in one of his letters to he