zed what he was doing.
Marcella was very bad for him; her courteous belief in him encouraged
him to deceive her; he thought she was rather silly; any other girl
would have chaffed him, have capped his tales by others, obviously
"tall" as Violet had done until he had sickened her entirely; but to
Marcella's Keltic imagination there was nothing incredible in his gory,
gorgeous exploits; was not she, herself, the daughter of a faraway
spaewife who could slide down moonbeams and ride on the breasts of
snowflakes? And was not she herself a fighter of windmills? To her
Romance could not come in too brightly-coloured garb, and so her Romance
wove a net about him. Sometimes it flattered: sometimes it amused:
sometimes it gave a sense of kinship that made him think that, unless
she were a liar she would never have so sympathized with him. He was
unable to trace the fine distinction in veracity between describing a
perfectly fictitious operation performed by oneself, and in recounting
the messages given by the screaming gulls, the whining winds on
Lashnagar.
On one or two things she was certainly caught up sharp. His taste in
books showed a width of divergence between them that nothing could ever
bridge; seeing her with "Fruit Gathering" which the schoolmaster had
lent to her, he asked what it was.
"It's by Tagore," she ventured.
"Tagore? Never heard of him," he said dismissively.
In the fly-leaf of the book was a beautiful portrait of Tagore. She
showed it to him, remarking that he was the Bengali poet.
"Oh, a nigger!" he cried contemptuously, pushing the book on one side.
She frowned at him and shyly suggested that Christ, in that case, shared
Tagore's disadvantage. He laughed loudly. Then she opened the book at
random. She had been impressed with something before going to bed the
night before.
"Listen to this, Louis. I thought I'd like to read it to you," she
said, and read, "'Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to
be fearless in facing them. And this--listen, 'Let me not look for
allies in life's fight, but to my own strength'; and here's the best bit
of all, 'Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling your mercy in my
success alone; but let me find the grasp of your hand in my failure.' I
wish so much I could have found that before father died and read it to
him."
"Oh--poetry," he said contemptuously; "a lot of high falutin'
nonsense--and by a nigger too! What's that someone said? 'Intoxicat
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