“But it is—­”

“No, not to me.  You wouldn’t be so great a poet if it were.  I don’t see myself here; but I see you, and your idea of me.  It’s—­it’s dedicated to that dream of yours.  Didn’t I tell you your dream was divorced from reality?”

“You told me it would be reconciled to it.”

“And it is, isn’t it?  And the reality is worth all the dreams that ever were?”

He could have told her that so it appeared to those who are bound in the house of bondage; but that in Leuce, the country of deliverance, the dream and the reality are indivisible, being both divine.  He could have told her that he had known as much five years ago; even before he knew her.

“After all,” he said, “that’s admitting that they are divided.  And that, if you remember, was what I said, not what you said.”

Lucia evaded the issue in a fashion truly feminine.  “It doesn’t matter a bit what either of us said then, so long as you know now.”

“There’s one thing I don’t know.  I don’t know how you really take it; or whether you will really understand.  Just now I thought you did, But after all it seems you don’t.  You think I’m only trying to pay you a stupid literary compliment.  You think when I wrote those things I didn’t mean them; my imagination was simply taking a rather more eccentric flight than usual.  Isn’t that so?”

“I’m certainly allowing for your imagination.  I can’t forget that you are a poet.  You won’t let me forget it.  I can’t separate your genius from the rest of you.”

“And I can’t separate the rest of me from it.  That makes the difference, you see.”  He was angry as he said that.  He had wondered whether she would deal as tenderly with his passion as she had dealt with his dream; and she had dealt just as tenderly.  But it was because she identified the passion with the dream.  He had not been prepared for that view of it; and somehow it annoyed him.  But for that, he would never have spoken as he now did.  “When I wondered how you would take it I thought it might possibly strike you as something rather too real, almost offensively so.  Do you know, I’d rather you’d taken it that way than that you should talk about my dreams.  My dreams.” (It was shocking, the violent emphasis of disgust the poet, the dreamer, flung into that one word.) “As if I’d dreamed that I knew you.  As if I’d dreamed that I cared for you.  Would you rather think I dreamed it?  You can if you like.  Or would you rather think it was the most real thing that ever happened to me?  So real that after it happened—­because it happened—­I left off being the sort of man and the sort of poet I was, and became another sort.  So real and so strong that it saved me from one or two other things, uncommonly strong and real, that had got a pretty tight hold of me, too.  Would you rather think that you’d really done this for me, or that I’d dreamed it all?”