The Muse's Tragedy

Danyers afterwards liked to fancy that he had recognized Mrs. Anerton at
once; but that, of course, was absurd, since he had seen no portrait of
her--she affected a strict anonymity, refusing even her photograph to the
most privileged--and from Mrs. Memorall, whom he revered and cultivated
as her friend, he had extracted but the one impressionist phrase: "Oh,
well, she's like one of those old prints where the lines have the value of
color."

He was almost certain, at all events, that he had been thinking of Mrs.
Anerton as he sat over his breakfast in the empty hotel restaurant, and
that, looking up on the approach of the lady who seated herself at the
table near the window, he had said to himself, "_That might be she_."

Ever since his Harvard days--he was still young enough to think of them as
immensely remote--Danyers had dreamed of Mrs. Anerton, the Silvia of
Vincent Rendle's immortal sonnet-cycle, the Mrs. A. of the _Life and
Letters_. Her name was enshrined in some of the noblest English verse of
the nineteenth century--and of all past or future centuries, as Danyers,
from the stand-point of a maturer judgment, still believed. The first
reading of certain poems--of the _Antinous_, the _Pia Tolomei_, the
_Sonnets to Silvia_,--had been epochs in Danyers's growth, and the verse
seemed to gain in mellowness, in amplitude, in meaning as one brought to
its interpretation more experience of life, a finer emotional sense.
Where, in his boyhood, he had felt only the perfect, the almost austere
beauty of form, the subtle interplay of vowel-sounds, the rush and fulness
of lyric emotion, he now thrilled to the close-packed significance of each
line, the allusiveness of each word--his imagination lured hither and
thither on fresh trails of thought, and perpetually spurred by the sense
that, beyond what he had already discovered, more marvellous regions lay
waiting to be explored. Danyers had written, at college, the prize essay
on Rendle's poetry (it chanced to be the moment of the great man's death);
he had fashioned the fugitive verse of his own storm-and-stress period on
the forms which Rendle had first given to English metre; and when two
years later the _Life and Letters_ appeared, and the Silvia of the sonnets
took substance as Mrs. A., he had included in his worship of Rendle the
woman who had inspired not only such divine verse but such playful,
tender, incomparable prose.

Danyers never forgot the day when Mrs. Memorall happened to mention that
she knew Mrs. Anerton. He had known Mrs. Memorall for a year or more, and
had somewhat contemptuously classified her as the kind of woman who runs
cheap excursions to celebrities; when one afternoon she remarked, as she
put a second lump of