inded that the question before them was
whether Mr. Prothero, in issuing a volume, at three and six net, with
the title of "Transparences," and the sub-title of "Poems," was or was
not seeking to obtain money under false pretenses. And judgment in
Prothero's case was given thus: Any writer who wilfully and deliberately
takes for his subject a heap of theoretical, transcendental stuff, stuff
that at its best is pure hypothesis, and at its worst an outrage on the
sane intelligence of his readers, stuff, mind you, utterly lacking in
simplicity, sensuousness and passion, that writer may be a thinker, a
mystic, a metaphysician of unspeakable profundity, but he is not a poet.
He stands condemned in the interests of Reality.

Laura knew it didn't matter what they said about him, but that last
touch kindled her to flame. It even drew fire from Owen.

"If I gave them the reality they want," he cried; "if I brought them the
dead body of God with the grave-clothes and worms about it, they'd call
that poetry. I bring them the living body of God rejoicing in life, and
they howl at me. What their own poets, their Wordsworths and Tennysons
and Brownings showed them in fits and flashes, I show them in one
continuous ecstasy, and they can't stand it. They might complain, the
beggars, if I'd given them a dramatic trilogy or an epic. But when I've
let them off, Laura, with a few songs!"

They were alone in his big room. Nina and Tanqueray and Jane had come
and praised him, and Laura had been very entertaining over Prothero's
reviews. But, when they had gone, she came and crouched on the floor
beside him, as her way was, and leaned her face against his hand.
Prothero, with the hand that was not engaged with Laura, turned over the
pages of his poems. He was counting them, to prove the slenderness of
his offence.

"Listen to this," he said. "They can't say it's _not_ a song."

He read and she listened, while her hand clutched his, as if she held
him against the onslaught of the world.

Her grip slackened as she surrendered to his voice. She lay back, as it
were, and was carried on the strong wave of the rhythm. It was the
questing song of the soul, the huntress, on the heavenly track; the song
of the soul, the fowler, who draws after her the streaming worlds, as a
net, to snare the wings of God. It was the song of her outcasting, of
the fall from heaven that came of the too great rapture of the soul, of
her wantoning in the joy of the