His voice dwelt tenderly upon her name.  His fever-haunted eyes were tender, too, for just a moment.  Then he grimaced.

“No, I am wrong—­the tragedy strikes deeper.  The root of it is that there is in you and in all your glittering kind no malice, no will to do harm nor to hurt anything, but just a bland and invincible and, upon the whole, a well-meaning stupidity, informing a bright and soft and delicately scented animal.  So you work ruin among those men who serve ideals, not foreplanning ruin, not desiring to ruin anything, not even having sufficient wit to perceive the ruin when it is accomplished.  You are, when all is done, not even detestable, not even a worthy peg whereon to hang denunciatory sonnets, you shallow-pated pretty creatures whom poets—­oh, and in youth all men are poets!—­whom poets, now and always, are doomed to hanker after to the detriment of their poesy.  No, I concede it:  you kill without premeditation, and without ever suspecting your hands to be anything but stainless.  So in logic I must retract all my harsh words; and I must, without any hint or reproach, endeavour to bid you a somewhat more civil farewell.”

She had regarded him, throughout this preposterous and uncalled-for harangue, with sad composure, with a forgiving pity.  Now she asked him, very quietly, “Where are you going, Kit?”

“To the Golden Hind, O gentle, patient and unjustly persecuted virgin martyr!” he answered, with an exaggerated how—­“since that is the part in which you now elect to posture.”

“Not to that low, vile place again!”

“But certainly I intend in that tavern to get tipsy as quickly as possible:  for then the first woman I see will for the time become the woman whom I desire and who exists nowhere.”  And with that the red-haired man departed, limping and singing as he went to look for a trull in a pot-house.

Sang Kit Marlowe: 

  “And I will make her beds of roses
  And a thousand fragrant posies;
  A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
  Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.

  “A gown made of the finest wool
  Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
  Fair-lined slippers for the cold,
  With buckles of the purest gold—­”

III

ECONOMICS OF EGERIA

She sat quite still when Marlowe had gone.

“He will get drunk again,” she thought despondently.  “Well, and why should it matter to me if he does, after all that outrageous ranting?  He has been unforgivably insulting—­Oh, but none the less, I do not want to have him babbling of the roses and gold of that impossible fairy world which the poor, frantic child really believes in, to some painted woman of the town who will laugh at him.  I loathe the thought of her laughing at him—­and kissing him!  His notions are wild foolishness; but I at least wish that they were not foolishness, and that hateful woman will not care one way or the other.”