“I’ll tell you what’s the matter with you,” said Sammy, with the shrewdness that business had taught him.  “The magazine has turned down some of your poetry stunts.  That’s why you are sore at it.”

“That would be a good guess in Wall Street or in a campaign for the presidency of a woman’s club,” said Ravenel, quietly.  “Now, there is a poem—­if you will allow me to call it that—­of my own in this number of the magazine.”

“Read it to me,” said Sammy, watching a cloud of pipe-smoke he had just blown out the window.

Ravenel was no greater than Achilles.  No one is.  There is bound to be a spot.  The Somebody-or-Other must take hold of us somewhere when she dips us in the Something-or-Other that makes us invulnerable.  He read aloud this verse in the magazine: 

   The four roses

   “One rose I twined within your hair—­
       (White rose, that spake of worth);
    And one you placed upon your breast—­
       (Red rose, love’s seal of birth). 
    You plucked another from its stem—­
       (Tea rose, that means for aye);
    And one you gave—­that bore for me
       The thorns of memory.”

“That’s a crackerjack,” said Sammy, admiringly.

“There are five more verses,” said Ravenel, patiently sardonic.  “One naturally pauses at the end of each.  Of course—­”

“Oh, let’s have the rest, old man,” shouted Sammy, contritely, “I didn’t mean to cut you off.  I’m not much of a poetry expert, you know.  I never saw a poem that didn’t look like it ought to have terminal facilities at the end of every verse.  Reel off the rest of it.”

Ravenel sighed, and laid the magazine down.  “All right,” said Sammy, cheerfully, “we’ll have it next time.  I’ll be off now.  Got a date at five o’clock.”

He took a last look at the shaded green garden and left, whistling in an off key an untuneful air from a roofless farce comedy.

The next afternoon Ravenel, while polishing a ragged line of a new sonnet, reclined by the window overlooking the besieged garden of the unmercenary baron.  Suddenly he sat up, spilling two rhymes and a syllable or two.

Through the trees one window of the old mansion could be seen clearly.  In its window, draped in flowing white, leaned the angel of all his dreams of romance and poesy.  Young, fresh as a drop of dew, graceful as a spray of clematis, conferring upon the garden hemmed in by the roaring traffic the air of a princess’s bower, beautiful as any flower sung by poet—­thus Ravenel saw her for the first time.  She lingered for a while, and then disappeared within, leaving a few notes of a birdlike ripple of song to reach his entranced ears through the rattle of cabs and the snarling of the electric cars.