And he must read, too. During the years that the locust of war had eaten, his educational development had stood still. His English literary equipment fell far short of that required by a successful English man of letters. Vast tracts of the most glorious literature in the world he had as yet left unexplored. The great Elizabethan dramatists, for instance. Thick, serious volumes from the London Library strewed the furniture of the wind-swept sitting-room. Olivia, caught by his enthusiasm and proud to identify herself with him in this feeding of the fires of his genius, read with him; and to them together were revealed the clanging majesty of Marlowe, the subtle beauty of Beaumont and Fletcher, the haunting gloom of Webster. In the evenings they would sit, lover-like, the book between them, and read aloud, taking parts; and it never failed to be an astonishment and a thrill to the girl when, declaiming a fervid passage, he seemed for the moment to forget her and to live in the sense of the burning words. It was her joy to force her emotion to his pitch. Once, reading Beaumont and Fletcher’s _Philaster_, he clutched her tightly with his left arm, while his right hand upstretched, invoked unheeding Heaven, and declaimed: “And then have taken me some mountain girl, Beaten with winds, chaste as the hardened rocks Whereon she dwells; that might have strewn my bed With leaves and reeds, and with the skins o’ Beasts, Our neighbours; and have borne at her big breasts My large coarse issue! This had been a life Free from vexation.” “But, Alexis, darling, I’m so sorry,” she cried. “Why? What do you mean?” “You said it as if you meant it, as if it was the desire of your heart. I’m not a bit like that.” They laughed and kissed. A dainty interlude. “You’ve never really felt like that?” “Never.” “The idea isn’t even new,” exclaimed Olivia, with grand inversion of chronology. “Tennyson has something like it in _Locksley Hall_. How does it go?” With a wrinkling of the brow she quoted: “Then the passions cramped no longer shall have scope and breathing space I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race. “Iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, they shall dive and they shall run, Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun.” “So he did!” cried Triona. “How wonderful of you to remember! Why—the dear beautiful old thief!” He forgot the point at issue in contemplation of the literary coincidence of plagiarism. “Well, I’m damned! Such a crib! With the early Victorian veil of prudery over it! Oh, Lord! Give me the Elizabethan, any day. Yet, isn’t it funny? The period-spirit? If Tennyson had been an Elizabethan, he would have walked over Beaumont and Fletcher like a Colossus; but in a world under the awe of Queen Victoria’s red flannel petticoat he is reduced to stealing Elizabethan thunder and reproducing it with a bit of sheet iron and a stick.”