And still the poet made for her little chaplets of song, to deck her
forehead in the courts of Time: and still she wore instead the worthless
garlands, that boisterous citizens flung to her in the ways, made out of
perishable things.
And after a while whenever these garlands died the poet came to her
with his chaplets of song; and still she laughed at him and wore the
worthless wreaths, though they always died at evening.
And one day in his bitterness the poet rebuked her, and said to her:
"Lovely Fame, even in the highways and the byways you have not
foreborne to laugh and shout and jest with worthless men, and I have
toiled for you and dreamed of you and you mock me and pass me by."
And Fame turned her back on him and walked away, but in departing
she looked over her shoulder and smiled at him as she had not smiled
before, and, almost speaking in a whisper, said:
"I will meet you in the graveyard at the back of the Workhouse in a
hundred years."
CHARON
Charon leaned forward and rowed. All things were one with his
weariness.
It was not with him a matter of years or of centuries, but of wide
floods of time, and an old heaviness and a pain in the arms that had
become for him part of the scheme that the gods had made and was
of a piece with Eternity.
If the gods had even sent him a contrary wind it would have divided
all time in his memory into two equal slabs.
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