"What I told you once about my coming to Paris to work at art was all lies. I came here because I had to leave nothing else behind, not even a name. You said, one evening when we were arguing about ambition, that if you could only find your line you might do something on the stage. Why don't you recite my poems? Read them through. One or two are in English, but most of them are in French. They are really more sighs than poems. They require no acting. They want just a voice." He undid the leather strap that supported his satchel and handed it to Sylvia. "To-morrow," he said, "if I'm still alive, I'll come here and find out what you think of them. But you've no idea how threatening that 'if' is. It gets longer and longer. I can't see the end if it anywhere. It was very long last night. The dot of the 'i' was already out of sight. It's the longest 'if' that was ever imagined." He rose hurriedly and left the café; Sylvia never saw him again. The poems of this strange and unhappy creature formed a record of many years' slow debasement. Many of them seemed to her too personal and too poignant to be repeated aloud, almost even to be read to oneself. There was nothing, indeed, to do but burn them, that no one else might comprehend a man's degradation. Some of the poems, however, were objective, and in their complete absence of any effort to impress or rend or horrify they seemed not so much poems as actual glimpses into human hearts. Nor was that a satisfactory definition, for there was no attempt to explain any of the people described in these poems; they were ordinary people of the streets that lived in a few lines. This could only be said of the poems written in French; those in English seemed to her not very remarkable. She wondered if perhaps the less familiar tongue had exacted from him an achievement that was largely fortuitous. "I've got an idea for a show," Sylvia said to Mrs. Gainsborough. "One or two old folk-songs, and then one of these poems half sung, half recited to an improvised accompaniment. Not more than one each evening." Sylvia was convinced of her ability to make a success, and spent a couple of weeks in searching for the folk-songs she required.