gland, or rather
London, for I know little of England outside London, was an ideal place
to me, till they punished me because I did not share their tastes. What
an absurdity it all was, Frank: how dared they punish me for what is
good in my eyes? How dared they?" and he fell into moody thought.... The
idea of a new gospel did not really interest him.

It was about this time he first told me of a new play he had in mind.

"It has a great scene, Frank," he said. "Imagine a _roue_ of forty-five
who is married; incorrigible, of course, Frank, a great noble who gets
the person he is in love with to come and stay with him in the country.
One evening his wife, who has gone upstairs to lie down with a
headache, is behind a screen in a room half asleep; she is awakened by
her husband's courting. She cannot move, she is bound breathless to her
couch; she hears everything. Then, Frank, the husband comes to the door
and finds it locked, and knowing that his wife is inside with the host,
beats upon the door and will have entrance, and while the guilty ones
whisper together--the woman blaming the man, the man trying to think of
some excuse, some way out of the net--the wife gets up very quietly and
turns on the lights while the two cowards stare at her with wild
surmise. She passes to the door and opens it and the husband rushes in
to find his hostess as well as the host and his wife. I think it is a
great scene, Frank, a great stage picture."

"It is," I said, "a great scene; why don't you write it?"

"Perhaps I shall, Frank, one of these days, but now I am thinking of
some poetry, a 'Ballad of a Fisher Boy,' a sort of companion to 'The
Ballad of Reading Gaol,' in which I sing of liberty instead of prison,
joy instead of sorrow, a kiss instead of an execution. I shall do this
joy-song much better than I did the song of sorrow and despair."

"Like Davidson's 'Ballad of a Nun,'" I said, for the sake of saying
something.

"Naturally Davidson would write the 'Ballad of a Nun,' Frank; his talent
is Scotch and severe; but I should like to write 'The Ballad of a Fisher
Boy,'" and he fell to dreaming.

The thought of his punishment was oft with him. It seemed to him
hideously wrong and unjust. But he never questioned the right of society
to punish. He did not see that, if you once grant that, the wrong done
to him could be defended.

"I used to think myself a lord of life," he said. "How dared those
little wretches condemn me and p