Since times and places were of no account, he might have been coming, as he came five years ago, to hear her judgement on his neo-classic drama.  Strange and great things had happened to his genius since that day.  Between Helen in Leuce and the Nine and Twenty Sonnets there lay the newly discovered, heavenly countries of the soul.

“Well,” he said, glancing at the poems, as he seated himself.  “What do you think of them?  Am I forgiven?  Do you consent?”

“So many questions?  They’re all answered, aren’t they, if I say I consent?”

“And do you?” There was acute anxiety in his voice and eyes.  It struck her as painful that the man, whom she was beginning to look on as possibly the greatest poet of his age, should think it necessary to plead to her for such a little thing.

“I do indeed.”

“Without reservations?”

“What reservations should there be?  Of course I could only be glad—­and proud—­that you should do me so much honour.  If I can’t say very much about it, don’t think I don’t feel it.  I feel it more than I can say.”

“Do you really mean it?  I was afraid that it might offend you; or that you’d think I oughtn’t to have written the things; or at any rate that I’d no business to show them to you.  And as for the dedication, I couldn’t tell how you’d feel about that.”

And she, having before her eyes the greatness of his genius, was troubled by the humility and hesitation of his approach.  It recalled to her the ways of his pathetic youth, his youth that obscurity made wild and shy and unassured.

“I can’t tell either,” she replied, “I don’t know whether I ought to feel proud or humble about it; but I think I feel both.  Your wanting to dedicate anything to me would have been enough to make me very proud.  Even if it had been a little thing—­but this thing is great.  In some ways it seems to me the greatest thing you’ve done yet.  I did think just at first that I ought perhaps to refuse because of that.  And then I saw that, really, that was what made it easy for me to accept.  It’s so great that the dedication doesn’t count.”

“But it does count.  It’s the only thing that counts to me.  You can’t take it like that and separate it from the rest.  Those sonnets would still be dedicated to you even if you refused to let me write your name before them.  I want you to see that they are the dedication.”

Lucia shook her head.  She had seen it.  She could see nothing else when she read them.  How was it that the poet’s bodily presence made her inclined to ignore the reference to herself; to take these poems dedicated to her as an event, not in her life or his, but in the history of literature?

“No,” she said, “you must not look at them that way.  If they were, it might be a reason for refusing.  I know most people would think they’d less right to accept what wasn’t really dedicated to them.  But, you see, it’s just because it isn’t really dedicated to me that I can accept it.”