"I don't wish my little boy to wear flowers. He is too young. I heard
you promising him a carnation for to-morrow. You mustn't think me rude,
but, please, don't give him one."
Lord Reggie looked rather surprised.
"I am afraid he will be disappointed," he said.
"I cannot help that. And he will have forgotten it in five minutes.
Children are as volatile as--as----"
"As lovers," said Madame Valtesi, who was smoking a cigarette in a chair
by the window. "And forget as soon."
"Every one forgets," Esmé Amarinth said, with a gracious smile that
illuminated his large features with slow completeness. "It is only when
we have learned to love forgetfulness that we have learned the art of
living. I wish people would forget me; but somehow they never do. Long
after I have completely forgotten them they remember me. Then I have to
pretend that I remember them, and that is so fatiguing."
"Esmé," said Mrs. Windsor, "do sing us your song of the passer-by. That
is all about remembering and forgetting, and all that sort of thing. So
sweet. I remember it made me cry when I heard it--or was it laugh? Which
did you mean it to do?"
"I did not mean it to do anything. The poet who means much is little of
a poet. I will sing you the song; but it is dreadfully direct in
expression. I wrote it one night at Oxford when I was supremely drunk. I
remember I wept as I wrote, great, wonderful tears. Yes, I will sing it.
It is full of the sorrow, the white burnished sorrow of youth. How
divine the melancholies of youth are! With age comes folly, and with
folly comes the appalling merriment of experience. Experienced men are
always merry. They see things as they really are. How terrible! until we
can see things as they really are not we never truly live."
He went slowly to the piano, sat down, and played a plaintive, fleeting
air--an air that was like a wandering moonbeam, the veritable phantom of
a melody. Then he sang this song, in a low and almost toneless voice,
uttering the notes rather than vocalising them.