She turned her tumbler upside down in token of renunciation and led the way into the front room.  He followed her with enchanted feet.  He was now moving as in an Arabian Night’s dream.

In the front room was a sofa—­No, a divan, and on the divan the skin of a Polar bear sprawling.  Rickman and Poppy sat on the top of the bear.  Such a disreputable, out-of-elbow, cosmopolitan bear!  His little eye-holes were screwed up in a wicked wink, a wink that repudiated any connection with his native waters of the Pole.

The house was very still.  Behind his yellow gauze curtain the canary stirred in his sleep.  “Swe-eet,” he murmured plaintively in his dream.

“Swe-eet, dicky!” echoed Poppy.  Then because she had nothing to say she began to sing.  She sang the song of Simpson the tenor, Simpson the master of tears.

    “’Twas on the night our little byby died,
    And Bill, ’e comes, and, ‘Sal,’ ’e sez,’look ere,
    I’ve signed a pledge,’ser ’e, ’agains the beer. 
          ‘D’ye see?’
          Sez ’e. 
        ’And wot I ’ope ter syve
    Will tittervyte ‘is bloomin’ little gryve.’ 
    Then—­Well—­yo’ should ’ave ’eard us ’ow we cried—­
    Like bloomin’ kids—­the—­night—­the byby—­died.

“That song,” said Poppy, “doesn’t exactly suit my style of beauty.  You should have heard Simpey sing it. That ’d ’ave given you something to ’owl for.”

For Rickman looked depressed.

The sound of Poppy’s song waked the canary; he fluttered down from his perch and stretched his wings, trailing them on the floor of his cage to brush the sleep out of them.

“Did you ever see such affectation,” said Poppy, “look at him, striking attitudes up there, all by ’is little self!”

Poppy seemed to cling to the idea of the canary as a symbol of propriety.

“Do you know, Rickets, it’s past twelve o’clock?”

No, he didn’t know.  He had taken no count of time.  But he knew that he had drunk a great many little tumblers of champagne, and that his love for Poppy seemed more than ever a supersensuous and immortal thing.  He pulled himself together in order to tell her so; but at that moment he was confronted by an insuperable difficulty.  In the tender and passionate speech that he was about to make to her, it would be necessary to address her by name.  But how—­in Heaven’s name—­could he address a divinity as Poppy?  He settled the difficulty by deciding that he would not address her at all.  There should be no invocation.  He would simply explain.

He got up and walked about the room and explained in such words as pleased him the distinction between the corruptible and the incorruptible Eros.  From time to time he chanted his own poems in the intervals of explaining; for they bore upon the matter in hand.

“Rickets,” said Poppy, severely, “you’ve had too much fizz.  I can see it in your eyes—­most unmistakably.  I know it isn’t very nice of me to say so, when it’s my fizz you’ve been drinking; but it isn’t really mine, it’s Dicky Pilkington’s—­at least he paid for it.”