"You will write it! Do you--can you imagine that I am jealous--that I am not as ambitious for you as you could be for yourself?"
"I have never been ambitious before. I have never cared enough about the world. I wrote first because the songs sang off the point of my quill, and then to keep a roof over my head. I have never placed any inordinate value on my work after it was done, although the making of it gave me the keenest happiness, the polishing delighted all the artist in me. It is only now, now, for the first time, that I have been fancying myself going down to posterity in the company of the immortals. Oh God, what irony! When it did not matter the inspiration lagged, and now it can do me no good!"
"But it shall! And as much for me as for your fame. Your work has been little less to me than yourself. I must have this!"
He turned to her for the first time and looked at her curiously. "Is it possible that you do not know the reason why I cannot write?" he asked. "We have avoided the subject, but I understood that you knew. Hunsdon told me----"
"Oh, yes, but that was when you were physically and morally a----" she stopped short, blushing painfully.
"A wreck," he supplemented grimly.
"Well! You had let yourself go. Now it is different. You are well. You are happy. Even your brain is stronger--your will, as a matter of course."
"I never wrote a line in my earliest youth without stimulant."
"But you might have done so. It is only a freak of imagination that prompts you to believe that you cannot write alone, that you must take alcohol into partnership, as it were. Even little people are ruled by imagination; how much more so a great faculty in which imagination must follow many morbid and eccentric tracks? And habit, no doubt, is the greatest of all forces, while it is undisturbed. But that old habit of yours has been shattered these last months. You made no attempt to resist before. You could resist now. If I have been the inspiration of this poem, why cannot I take the place of brandy? It is no great compliment to me if I cannot. Try."
He put his hands on her shoulders and looked more the man than the poet for the moment. "Anne," he said solemnly. "Let well enough alone. I made up my mind to write no more the day you promised to marry me. I told you that the lover had buried the poet, and I believed it. But I find that the poet must come to life now and again--for a while at least. But although the process will be neither pleasant nor painless, I shall strangle him in time."