e and slip
it under a microscope. My poems are like that. The words are the
bacteria. Few can identify them."

"Are you serious?"

"Entirely."

He maintained his gravity: "Would you be kind enough to take a smear
and let me look?" he inquired politely.

"Certainly: the experiment is called 'Unpremeditation.'"

She dropped one thin and silken knee over the other and crossed her
hands on it as she recited her poem.

"UNPREMEDITATION."

"In the tube.
Several,
With intonation.
Red, red, red.
A square fabric
Once white
With intention.
Soiled, soiled, soiled.
Six hundred hundred million
Swarm like vermin,
Without intention.
Redder. Redder.
Drip, drip, drip.
A goes west,
B goes east,
C goes north,
Pink, pink, pink.
Two white squares.
And a coat-sleeve.
Without intention,
Intonations.
Pinker. Redder.
Six hundred hundred million.
Billions. Trillions.
A week. Two weeks.
Otherwise?
Eternity."

Jim's features had become a trifle glassy. "You do skip a few words,"
he said, "don't you?"

"Words are animalculae. Some skip, some gyrate, some sub-divide."

He put a brave face on the matter: "If you're not really guying me,"
he ventured, "would you tell me a little about your poem?"

"Why, yes," she replied amiably. "To put it redundantly, then, I have
sketched in my poem a man in the subway, with influenza, which infects
others in his vicinity."

She rose, smiled, and sauntered off, leaving him utterly unable to
determine whether or not he had been outrageously imposed upon. Palla
rescued him, and he went with her, a little wild-eyed, downstairs to
the nearly empty and carpetless drawing-room, where a music box was
playing and people were already dancing.

Toward midnight, Marya, passing Jim on her way to the front door,
leaned wide from Vanya's arm:

"Let us at least discuss my rainbow theory," she said, laughing, and
her