"I'm not at all sure about that"--she said--"Poets have all been doubtful specimens of humanity at their best. You see their lives are entirely occupied in writing what isn't true--and of course it tells' on them in the long run. They deceive others first, and then they deceive themselves, though in their fits of 'inspiration' as they call it, they may, while weaving a thousand lies, accidentally hit on one truth. But the lies chiefly predominate. Dante, for example, was a perfectly brazen liar. He DIDN'T go to Hell, or Purgatory, or Paradise--and he DIDN'T bother himself about Beatrice at all. He married someone else and had a family. Nothing could be more commonplace. He invented his Inferno in order to put his enemies there, all roasting, boiling, baking or freezing. It was pure personal spite--and it is the very force of his vindictiveness that makes the Inferno the best part of hid epic. The portraits of Dante alone are enough to show you the sort of man he was. WHAT a creature to meet in a dark lane at midnight!" Here she made a grimace, drawing her mouth down into the elongated frown of the famous Florentine, with such an irresistibly comic effect that Adderley gave way to a peal of hearty, almost boyish laughter. "That's right!" said Cicely approvingly--"That's YOU, you know! It's natural to laugh at your age--you're only about six or seven-and- twenty, aren't you?" "I shall be twenty-seven in August,"--he said with a swift return to solemnity--"That is, as you will admit, getting on towards thirty." "Oh, nonsense! Everybody's getting on towards thirty, of course--or towards sixty, or towards a hundred. I shall be fifteen in October, but 'you will admit'"--here she mimicked his voice and accent--"that I am getting on towards a hundred. Some folks think I've turned that already, and that I'm entering my second century, I talk so 'old.' But my talk is nothing to what I feel--I feel--oh!" and she gave a kind of angular writhe to her whole figure--"like twenty Methusalehs in one girl!" "You are an original!"--said Julian, nodding at her with an air of superior wisdom--"That's what you are!" "Like you, Sir Moon-Calf"--said Cicely--"The word 'moon-calf,' you know, stands for poet--it means a human calf that grazes on the moon. Naturally the animal never gets fat,--nor will you; it always looks odd--and so will you; it never does anything useful,--nor will you; and it puts a kind of lunar crust over itself, under which crust it writes verses. When you break through, its crust you find something like a man, half-asleep--not knowing whether he's man or boy, and uncertain, whether to laugh or be serious till some girl pokes fun at him--and then---" "And then?"--laughed Adderley, entering vivaciously into her humour- -"What next?" "This, next!"--and Cicely pelted him full in the face with one of her velvety cowslip-bunches--'And this,--catch me if you can!"