Cordelia, remembering the source of all this unlooked-for publicity, sat in melancholy apprehension amid these notices, frightened a little at the stir she had made, and made so unwittingly, in the world of letters. Hartley, too, she soon found, fully shared in her own depression of spirits over the episode. So she decided it was best not even to speak of it, when it could be avoided, before him. While alone with her own thoughts she vainly attempted to school herself to regard it all in the words of one of her critics, "as only the musical _entr' acte_ in the drama of a busy literary life." When Repellier looked searchingly at Cordelia, and asked her, while speaking of The Need of War, how she had ever come by a touch so decisive and so powerful, she smiled quietly and said: "Did you ever hear of Ægles?" Repellier had not. "Well, according to that old Greek myth, Mr. Repellier, Ægles was a wrestler. He was born dumb, they say, and hadn't ever uttered a word in all his life. But one day in the arena he saw an athlete resort to some piece of dishonest trickery--I can't remember just what it was. Then, in his passion to denounce that trickery, he broke the strings of his tongue, and suddenly spoke." CHAPTER XXI THE SIGNS OF BLIGHT Some love your songs, but I who know The happier touch of lips whence flow These notes that all men turn to praise Loved you, the singer, all my days; And longing, listening, loving, I Have waited till the song should die-- Till you, the singer, came to bless My lips with your own lips' caress. JOHN HARTLEY, "The Silent Hour." Amid all his chaff were phrases that got down the neck of one's memory and tickled like barley-beards.--"The Silver Poppy." "Oh, my poet, my poet, what have they been doing to you?" It was Miss Short who spoke, looking up at Hartley with surprised and honestly reproving eyes. They had met by accident on upper Broadway, as he was on his way to the tea-room of a Fifth Avenue hotel. Both her tone and manner nettled him. "Am I so changed?" And he laughed uneasily. "Why, yes, my poor lost hero, and you're getting fat--no, not exactly fat, but prosperous looking. But a fat poet--it is awful! It sounds worse than a Hercules with French heels. It's as incongruous as an angel eating corn-mush. And who wants a fat poet? His corpulency would always be hinting to you that he was too trimly built, too well ballasted, to be in danger. He's too contented to be interesting. Who's going to thrill with anxiety over a mud-scow swinging in three feet of oily water?" "Thank you," said Hartley coldly. "But seriously, you haven't given up the--the open sea?" Miss Short asked him in a softer voice. This grandiloquence of metaphor wearied him.