“And Achilles?”

“Achilles is strength, virility, indestructible will.”

It seemed that while trivial excitement corrupted, intense feeling purified his speech, and as he pronounced these words every accent was irreproachable.  A lyric exaltation seemed to have seized him as it had seized him in the reading of Sophocles.

“The idea is reconciliation, the wedding of the Dream to reality.  I haven’t made up my mind whether the last chorus will be the Epithalamium or the Hymn to Pallas Athene.”

He paused for reflection, and in reflection the lyric rapture died.  He added pensively.  “The ’Ymn, I think.”

Lucia averted her ardent gaze before the horror in his young blue eyes.  They were the eyes of some wild winged creature dashed down from its soaring and frenzied by the fall.  Lucia could have wept for him.

“Then this,” said she, feigning an uninterrupted absorption in the manuscript, “this is not what my cousin saw?”

“No, h—­he only saw the first draft of the two first Acts.  It was horribly stiff and cold.  He said it was classical; I don’t know what he’d say it is now.  I began it that way, and it finished itself this way, and then I re-wrote the beginning.”

“I see.  I see.  Something happened to you.”  As she spoke she still kept her eyes fixed on the manuscript, as if she were only reading what was written there.  “You woke up—­in the middle of the second Act, wasn’t it?—­and came to life.  You heard the world—­the real world—­calling to you, and Helen and Achilles and all the rest of them turned to flesh and blood on your hands.”

“Yes,” he said, “they were only symbols and I’d no notion what they meant till they left off meaning it.”

She looked from the manuscript to him.  “You know in your heart you must be certain of yourself.  And yet—­I suspect the trouble with you is that your dream is divorced from reality.”

He stared in amazement at the young girl who thus interpreted him to herself.  At this rate he saw no end to her powers of divination.  There were depths in his life where her innocence could not penetrate, but she had seized on the essential.  It had been as she had said.  That first draft was the work of the young scholar poet, the adorer of classic form, the dreamer who found in his dreams escape from the grossness of his own lower nature and from the brutalities of the world he lived in.  A great neo-classic drama was to be his protest against modernity and actuality.  Then came an interval of a year in which he learnt many things that are not to be found in books, or adequately expressed through neo-classic drama; and the thing was finished and re-written at a time when, as she had said, something had happened to him; when that same gross actual world was making its claims felt through all his senses.  And he was suffering now the deep melancholy of perspicuous youth, unable to part with its dreams but aware that its dreams are hopelessly divorced from reality.  That was so; but how on earth did she know it?