"Is it?" said George Lambert. "Is _King Lear_ dead? I was crying over him last night, but it wasn't at his funeral I was crying. Is old Suckling dead? I bought a first edition of him some time ago, and the fact wasn't mentioned or hinted at in the verses. Is Sophocles dead? Old Maloney at Trinity pounded him into my head, and he's there now alive as ever; and if I was blind to-morrow, I'd still have the skies over his plays to look at and the choruses to hear. Ah no, Mr Cox, poetry is not dead, but they don't write it just now. They don't write it, but it's in every one's heart waiting to be tapped, only there's no man with an augur sharp enough and true enough to do the tapping." Pamela looked pleased. "I did not know that you were fond of poetry," she said. "I love it," said Lambert, in a tone that reminded Charles Bevan of Fanny's tone when she declared her predilection for cats. "I declare it's delightful," said Professor Wilson, "to find a man of the world who knows all about horses, and is a good billiard-player, and all that, confessing a love for poetry." "Perhaps Mr Lambert is a poet himself," said Hamilton-Cox, with a suspicion of a sneer, "or has written poetry." "Poetry! yards of it," answered the accused with a mellow laugh, "when I was young and--wise. The first poem I ever wrote was all about the moon; I wrote it when I was eleven, and sent it to a housemaid. Oh, murder! but the things that we do when we are young." "Did she read it?" "She couldn't read; it was in the days before the Board schools and the higher education of women. She couldn't read, she was forty, and ugly as sin; and she boxed my ears and told my mother, and my mother told my father, and he leathered me. He said, 'I'll teach you to write poetry to housemaids.' But somehow," said Mr Lambert, admiring with one eye the ruby-tinted light in his glass of port, "somehow, with all his teaching, I never wrote a poem to a housemaid again." "That must have been a loss to literature." "Yes, but it was a gain to housemaids; and as housemaids seem the main producers of novels and _poems_ nowadays, begad," said Mr Lambert, "it's, after all, a gain to literature." "That's one for you, Cox," said Professor Wilson, and Hamilton-Cox laughed, as he could well afford to do, for his lucubrations brought him in a good fifteen hundred a year, and his reputation was growing. On the lawn, under the starlit night after dinner, Bevan had his _fiancée_ for a moment alone. They sat in creaky basket-work chairs a good yard apart from each other. The moon was rising over the hills and deep, dark woods of Sussex, the air was warm and perfumed: it was an ideal night for love-making.