Part 21 (2/2)
”No, George; it was you. You introduced him.”
He owned it. ”I did it because I hoped you'd fall in love with him.”
She saw that there was a devil in him that still longed to torment her.
”That,” said she, ”would have been very bad for Nicky.”
”Yes. But it would have been very good for you.”
She had her moment of torment; then she recovered.
”I thought,” said she, ”that was the one thing I was not to do.”
”You're not to do it seriously. But you couldn't fall in love with Nicky seriously. Could you? Could anybody?”
”Why are you so unkind to Nicky?”
”Because he's so ungovernably a man of letters.”
”He isn't. He only thinks he is.”
”He thinks he's Sh.e.l.ley, because his father's a squire.”
”That saves him. No man of letters, if he tried all night, could think anything so deliciously absurd. Don't you wish _you_ could feel like that!”
He rose to it, his very excitement kindling his intellectual flame.
”To feel myself an immortal, a blessed G.o.d!”
They played together, profanely, with the idea that Nicky was after all divine.
”Such a tragic little G.o.d,” said Jane, with a pitiful mouth, ”a little G.o.d without a single apostle or a prophet--n.o.body,” she wailed, ”to spread the knowledge of him.”
”I say--_we_'ll build an altar on Wendover, to Nicky as the Unknown G.o.d.”
”He won't like that, our calling him unknown.”
”Let's call him the Unapparent--the Undeveloped. He is the Undeveloped.”
”In one aspect. In another he's a finished poem, an incarnate lyric----”
”An ode to immortality on legs----”
”Nicky hasn't any legs. He's a breath--a perpetual aspiration.”
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