But he could scarcely see that in a
violin concerto, a quartet for strings, or a symphony. So she argued.
And she searched anxiously for words which might be set dramatically,
descriptively. She dared not assail Claude yet with a libretto for
opera. She felt sure he would say he had no talent for such work, that
he was not drawn toward the theater. But if she could lead him gradually
toward things essentially dramatic, she might wake up in him forces the
tendency of which he had never suspected.

She re-read Rossetti, Keats, Shelley, dipped into William
Morris,--Wordsworth no--into Fiona Macleod, William Watson, John
Davidson, Alfred Noyes. Now and then she was strongly attracted by
something, she thought, "Will it do?" And always at such moments a
vision of Jacob Crayford seemed to rise up before her, with large brown
eyes, ears like a faun, nervous hands, and the tiny beard. "Is it a
business proposition?" The moving lips said that. And she gazed again at
the poem which had arrested her attention, she thought, "Is it a
business proposition?" Keats's terribly famous _Belle Dame Sans Merci_
really attracted her more than anything else. She knew it had been set
by Cyril Scott, and other ultra-modern composers, but she felt that
Claude could do something wonderful with it. Yet perhaps it was too well
known.

One lyric of William Watson's laid a spell upon her:

"Pass, thou wild heart,
Wild heart of youth that still
Hast half a will
To stay.
I grow too old a comrade, let us part.
Pass thou away."

She read that and the preceding verse again and again, in the grip of a
strange and melancholy fascination, dreaming. She woke, and remembered
that she was young, that Claude was young. But she had reached out and
touched old age. She had realized, newly, the shortness of the time. And
a sort of fever assailed her. Claude must begin, must waste no more
precious hours; she would take him the poem of William Watson, would
read it to him. He might make of it a song, and in the making he would
learn something perhaps--to hasten on the path.

She started for the studio one day, taking the _Belle Dame_, William
Watson's poems, and two or three books of French poetry, Verlaine,
Montesquiou, Moreas.

She arrived in Renwick Place just after four o'clock. She meant to make
tea for Claude and herself, and had brought with her some little cakes
and a bottle of milk. Quite a load she was carrying. The gouty hand