"
It seemed that while trivial excitement corrupted, intense feeling
purified his speech, and as he pronounced these words every accent was
irreproachable. A lyric exaltation seemed to have seized him as it had
seized him in the reading of Sophocles.
"The idea is reconciliation, the wedding of the Dream to reality. I
haven't made up my mind whether the last chorus will be the
Epithalamium or the Hymn to Pallas Athene."
He paused for reflection, and in reflection the lyric rapture died.
He added pensively. "The 'Ymn, I think."
Lucia averted her ardent gaze before the horror in his young blue
eyes. They were the eyes of some wild winged creature dashed down from
its soaring and frenzied by the fall. Lucia could have wept for him.
"Then this," said she, feigning an uninterrupted absorption in the
manuscript, "this is not what my cousin saw?"
"No, h--he only saw the first draft of the two first Acts. It was
horribly stiff and cold. He said it was classical; I don't know what
he'd say it is now. I began it that way, and it finished itself this
way, and then I re-wrote the beginning."
"I see. I see. Something happened to you." As she spoke she still kept
her eyes fixed on the manuscript, as if she were only reading what was
written there. "You woke up--in the middle of the second Act, wasn't
it?--and came to life. You heard the world--the real world--calling to
you, and Helen and Achilles and all the rest of them turned to flesh
and blood on your hands.
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