Yes, he was handsome and fascinating enough
externally, this blonde savage.
'A man may smile and smile and be a villain,' John thought. 'I wonder
how he'd feel, if he knew I knew he beats women.'
Already John had generalized the charge. 'I hope Cecilia will keep him
at arm's length,' he had said to Winifred, 'if only that she may not
smart for it some day.'
He lingered purposely in the hall to get an impression of the brute, who
had begun talking loudly to a friend with irritating bursts of laughter,
speciously frank-ringing. Golf, fishing, comic operas--ah, the Boeotian!
These were the men who monopolized the ethereal divinities.
But this brusque separation from his particular divinity was
disconcerting. How to see her again? He must go up to Oxford in the
morning, he wrote her that night, but if she could possibly let him
call during the week he would manage to run down again.
* * * * *
'Oh, my dear, dreaming poet,' she wrote to Oxford, 'how could you
possibly send me a letter to be laid on the breakfast-table beside _The
Times_! With a poem in it, too.
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