a Southerner. Says none of his people ever did work, and that there have always been peasants and fools who just couldn’t be restrained from working. That’s why he wears a beard. To shave, he holds, is unnecessary work, and, therefore, immoral. I remember, at Melbourne, when he broke in upon Dick and me, a sunburnt wild man from out the Australian bush. It seems he’d been making original researches in anthropology, or folk-lore-ology, or something like that. Dick had known him years before in Paris, and Dick assured him, if he ever drifted back to America, of food and shelter. So here he is.”

“And the poet?” Graham asked, glad that she must still talk for a while, enabling him to study the quick dazzlement of smile that played upon her face.

“Oh, Theo —