Like to a moving vintage down they came,
Crowned with green leaves, and faces all on flame
All madly dancing through the pleasant valley
  To scare thee, Melancholy! "_

It was the wondrous passage from _Endymion_, of the descent of the wild
inspired rabble into India. Ed plucked for a moment at his lower lip, and
then, with a "Hm! What's it all about, Bessie?" continued:

_"Within his car, aloft, young Bacchus stood,
Trifling his ivy-dart, in dancing mood,
  With sidelong laughing;
And little rills of crimson wine imbrued
His plump white arms and shoulders, enough white
  For Venus' pearly bite;
And near him rode Silenus on his ass,
Pelted with flowers as he on did pass,
  Tipsily quaffing. "_

"Hm! I see. Mythology. That's made up of tales, and myths, you know. Like
Odin and Thor and those, only those were Scandinavian Mythology. So it
would be absurd to take it too seriously. But I think, in a way, things
like that do harm. You see," he explained, "the more beautiful they are
the more harm they might do. We ought always to show virtue and vice in
their true colours, and if you look at it from that point of view this is
just drunkenness. That's rotten; destroys your body and intellect; as I
heard a chap say once, it's an insult to the beasts to call it beastly. I
joined the Blue Ribbon when I was fourteen and I haven't been sorry for
it yet. No. Now there's Vedder; he 'went off on a bend,' as he calls it,
last night, and even he says this morning it wasn't worth it. But let's
read on." Again he read, with unresilient movement:

"_I saw Osirian Egypt kneel adown
Before the vine wreath crown! I saw parched Abyssinia rouse and sing
  To the silver cymbals' ring! I saw the whelming vintage hotly pierce
  Old Tartary the fierce! Great Brahma from his mystic heaven groans_ ..."

"Hm! He was a Buddhist god, Brahma was; mythology again. As I say, if you
take it seriously, it's just glorifying intoxication.--But I say; I can
hardly see. Better light the lamp. We'll have tea first, then read. No,
you sit still; I'll get it ready; I know where things are--"

He rose, crossed to a little cupboard with a sink in it, filled the
kettle at the tap, and brought it to the fire. Then he struck a match and
lighted the lamp. The cheap glass shade was of a foolish corolla shape, clear glass below,
shading to pink, and deepening to red at the crimped edge. It gave a
false warmth to the spaces of the room above the level of the
mantelpiece, and Ed's figure, as he turned the regulator, looked from the
waist upwards as if he stood within that portion of a spectrum screen
that deepens to the band of red. The bright concentric circles that
spread in rings of red on the ceiling were more dimly reduplicated in the
old mirror over the mantelpiece; and the wintry eastern light beyond the
chimney-hoods seemed suddenly almost to die out. Bessie, her white neck below the level of the lamp-shade, had taken up
the book again; but she was not reading. She was looking over it at the
upper part of the grate. Presently she spoke. "I was looking at some of
those things this afternoon, at the Museum." He was clearing from the table more buckram linings and patterns of
paper, numbers of Myra's Journal and The Delineator. Already on his way
to the cupboard he had put aside a red-bodiced dressmaker's "shape" of
wood and wire. "What things?" he asked. "Those you were reading about. Greek, aren't they?" "Oh, the Greek room!... But those people, Bacchus and those, weren't
people in the ordinary sense. Gods and goddesses, most of 'em; Bacchus
was a god. That's what mythology means. I wish sometimes our course took
in Greek literature, but it's a dead language after all. German's more
good in modern life. It would be nice to know everything, but one has to
select, you know. Hallo, I clean forgot; I brought you some grapes,
Bessie; here they are, in this bag; we'll have 'em after tea, what?" "But," she said again after a pause, still looking at the grate, "they
had their priests and priestesses, and followers and people, hadn't they? It was their things I was looking at--combs and brooches and hairpins,
and things to cut their nails with. They're all in a glass case there. And they had safety-pins, exactly like ours." "Oh, they were a civilised people," said Ed cheerfully. "It all gives you
an idea. I only hope you didn't tire yourself out. You'll soon be all
right, of course, but you have to be careful yet. We'll have a clean
tablecloth, shall we?" She had been seriously ill; her life had been despaired of; and somehow
the young Polytechnic student seemed anxious to assure her that she was
now all right again, or soon would be. They were to be married "as soon
as things brightened up a bit," and he was very much in love with her. He
watched her head and neck as he continued to lay the table, and then, as
he crossed once more to the cupboard, he put his hand lightly in passing
on her hair. She gave so quick a start that he too started. She must have been very
deep in her reverie to have been so taken by surprise. "I say, Bessie, don't jump like that!" he cried with involuntary
quickness. Indeed, had his hand been red-hot, or ice-cold, or taloned,
she could not have turned a more startled, even frightened, face to him. "It was your touching me," she muttered, resuming her gazing into the
grate. He stood looking anxiously down on her. It would have been better not to
discuss her state, and he knew it; but in his anxiety he forgot it. "That jumpiness is the effect of your illness, you know. I shall be glad
when it's all over. It's made you so odd." She was not pleased that he should speak of her "oddness." For that
matter, she, too, found him "odd"--at any rate, found it difficult to
realise that he was as he always had been. He had begun to irritate her a
little. His club-footed reading of the verses had irritated her, and she
had tried hard to hide from him that his cocksure opinions and the tone
in which they were pronounced jarred on her. It was not that she was
"better" than he, "knew" any more than he did, didn't (she supposed) love
him still the same; these moods, that dated from her illness, had nothing
to do with those things; she reproached herself sometimes that she was
subject to such doldrums. "It's all right, Ed, but please don't touch me just now," she said. He was in the act of leaning over her chair, but he saw her shrink, and
refrained. "Poor old girl!" he said sympathetically. "What's the matter?" "I don't know. It's awfully stupid of me to be like this, but I can't
help it. I shall be better soon if you leave me alone." "Nothing's happened, has it?" "Only those silly dreams I told you about." "Bother the dreams!" muttered the Polytechnic student. During her illness she had had dreams, and had come to herself at
intervals to find Ed or the doctor, Mrs. Hepburn or her aunt, bending
over her. These kind, solicitous faces had been no more than a glimpse,
and then she had gone off into the dreams again.