"How did you find out? I mean how did you know I was trying to get a
rhyme to Florrie?" he asked sharply.
"I didn't know," said Clovis, "I only guessed. When you wanted to turn
the prosaic lorry of commerce into a feathered poem flitting through
the verdure of a tropical forest, I knew you must be working up a
sonnet, and Florrie was the only female name that suggested itself as
rhyming with lorry."
Septimus still looked uneasy.
"I believe you know more," he said.
Clovis laughed quietly, but said nothing.
"How much do you know?" Septimus asked desperately.
"The yew tree in the garden," said Clovis.
"There! I felt certain I'd dropped it somewhere. But you must have
guessed something before. Look here, you have surprised my secret.
You won't give me away, will you? It is nothing to be ashamed of, but
it wouldn't do for the editor of the CATHEDRAL MONTHLY to go in openly
for that sort of thing, would it?"
"Well, I suppose not," admitted Clovis.
"You see," continued Septimus, "I get quite a decent lot of money out
of it. I could never live in the style I do on what I get as editor of
the CATHEDRAL MONTHLY."
Clovis was even more startled than Septimus had been earlier in the
conversation, but he was better skilled in repressing surprise.
"Do you mean to say you get money out of--Florrie?" he asked.
"Not out of Florrie, as yet," said Septimus; "in fact, I don't mind
saying that I'm having a good deal of trouble over Florrie. But there
are a lot of others."
Clovis's cigarette went out.
"This is VERY interesting," he said slowly. And then, with Septimus
Brope's next words, illumination dawned on him.
"There are heaps of others; for instance:
'Cora with the lips of coral,
You and I will never quarrel.'
That was one of my earliest successes, and it still brings me in
royalties. And then there is--'Esmeralda, when I first beheld her,'
and 'Fair Teresa, how I love to please her,' both of those have been
fairly popular. And there is one rather dreadful one," continued
Septimus, flushing deep carmine, "which has brought me in more money
than any of the others:
'Lively little Lucie
With her naughty nez retrousse.'
Of course, I loathe the whole lot of them; in fact, I'm rapidly
becoming something of a woman-hater under their influence, but I can't
afford to disregard the financial aspect of the matter. And at the
same time you can understand that my position as an authority on
ecclesiastical architecture and liturgical subjects would be weakened,
if not altogether ruined, if it once got about that I was the author of
'Cora with the lips of coral' and all the rest of them."
Clovis had recovered sufficiently to ask in a sympathetic, if rather
unsteady, voice what was the special trouble with "Florrie."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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