Lena had left something warm and friendly in the lamplight. How I loved
to hear her laugh again! It was so soft and unexcited and appreciative
gave a favourable interpretation to everything. When I closed my eyes I
could hear them all laughing--the Danish laundry girls and the three
Bohemian Marys. Lena had brought them all back to me. It came over me, as
it had never done before, the relation between girls like those and the
poetry of Virgil. If there were no girls like them in the world, there
would be no poetry. I understood that clearly, for the first time. This
revelation seemed to me inestimably precious. I clung to it as if it might
suddenly vanish.
As I sat down to my book at last, my old dream about Lena coming across the
harvest-field in her short skirt seemed to me like the memory of an actual
experience. It floated before me on the page like a picture, and
underneath it stood the mournful line: 'Optima dies ... prima fugit.'
III
IN LINCOLN THE BEST part of the theatrical season came late, when the good
companies stopped off there for one-night stands, after their long runs in
New York and Chicago. That spring Lena went with me to see Joseph
Jefferson in `Rip Van Winkle,' and to a war play called `Shenandoah.' She
was inflexible about paying for her own seat; said she was in business now,
and she wouldn't have a schoolboy spending his money on her.
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