"He is my poet of poets--I know him almost by heart."
For an instant Miss Tita hesitated; then her sociability was
too much for her.
"Oh, by heart--that's nothing!" she murmured, smiling. "My aunt used
to know him--to know him"--she paused an instant and I wondered what she
was going to say--"to know him as a visitor."
"As a visitor?" I repeated, staring.
"He used to call on her and take her out."
I continued to stare. "My dear lady, he died a hundred years ago!"
"Well," she said mirthfully, "my aunt is a hundred and fifty."
"Mercy on us!" I exclaimed; "why didn't you tell me before?
I should like so to ask her about him."
"She wouldn't care for that--she wouldn't tell you,"
Miss Tita replied.
"I don't care what she cares for! She MUST tell me--
it's not a chance to be lost."
"Oh, you should have come twenty years ago: then she still
talked about him."
"And what did she say?" I asked eagerly.
"I don't know--that he liked her immensely."
"And she--didn't she like him?"
"She said he was a god." Miss Tita gave me this information flatly,
without expression; her tone might have made it a piece of trivial gossip.
But it stirred me deeply as she dropped the words into the summer night;
it seemed such a direct testimony.
"Fancy, fancy!" I murmured. And then, "Tell me this, please--has she
got a portrait of him? They are distressingly rare."
"A portrait? I don't know," said Miss Tita; and now there
was discomfiture in her face.
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