'

Ella Marchmill, sitting down alone a few minutes later, thought with
interested surprise of Robert Trewe. Her own latter history will best
explain that interest. Herself the only daughter of a struggling man of
letters, she had during the last year or two taken to writing poems, in
an endeavour to find a congenial channel in which to let flow her
painfully embayed emotions, whose former limpidity and sparkle seemed
departing in the stagnation caused by the routine of a practical
household and the gloom of bearing children to a commonplace father.
These poems, subscribed with a masculine pseudonym, had appeared in
various obscure magazines, and in two cases in rather prominent ones. In
the second of the latter the page which bore her effusion at the bottom,
in smallish print, bore at the top, in large print, a few verses on the
same subject by this very man, Robert Trewe. Both of them had, in fact,
been struck by a tragic incident reported in the daily papers, and had
used it simultaneously as an inspiration, the editor remarking in a note
upon the coincidence, and that the excellence of both poems prompted him
to give them together.

After that event Ella, otherwise 'John Ivy,' had watched with much
attention the appearance anywhere in print of verse bearing the signature
of Robert Trewe, who, with a man's unsusceptibility on the question of
sex, had never once thought of passing himself off as a woman. To be
sure, Mrs. Marchmill had satisfied herself with a sort of reason for
doing the contrary in her case; that nobody might believe in her
inspiration if they found that the sentiments came from a pushing
tradesman's wife, from the mother of three children by a matter-of-fact
small-arms manufacturer.

Trewe's verse contrasted with that of the rank and file of recent minor
poets in being impassioned rather than ingenious, luxuriant rather than
finished. Neither symboliste nor decadent, he was a pessimist in so far
as that character applies to a man who looks at the worst contingencies
as well as the best in the human condition. Being little attracted by
excellences of form and rhythm apart from content, he sometimes, when
feeling outran his artistic speed, perpetrated sonnets in the loosely
rhymed Elizabethan fashion, which every right-minded reviewer said he
ought not to have done.

With sad and hopeless envy, Ella Marchmill had often and often scanned
the rival poet's work, so much stronger as it always w