He had looked from his book
to me, and I looked back over my shoulder with a vague sense that I
ought to have recognized him. I returned to pay my respects. After
exchanging a few words, I said with a glance to the open book, "I see I
am interrupting you," and was about to pass on, but, "I prefer,' Soames
replied in his toneless voice, "to be interrupted," and I obeyed his gesture
that I should sit down.
I asked him if he often read here.
"Yes; things of this kind I read here," he answered, indicating the
title of his book--"The Poems of Shelley."
"Anything that you really"--and I was going to say "admire?" But I
cautiously left my sentence unfinished, and was glad that I had done so,
for he said with unwonted emphasis, "Anything second-rate."
I had read little of Shelley, but, "Of course," I murmured, "he's very
uneven."
"I should have thought evenness was just what was wrong with
him. A deadly evenness. That's why I read him here. The noise of this
place breaks the rhythm. He's tolerable here." Soames took up the book
and glanced through the pages. He laughed. Soames's laugh was a short,
single, and mirthless sound from the throat, unaccompanied by any
movement of the face or brightening of the eyes. "What a period!"
he uttered, laying the book down. And, "What a country!" he added.
I asked rather nervously if he didn't think Keats had more or less
held his own against the drawbacks of time and place.
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