Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III BETTINA PAYS FOR THE TAXI How Nature twists all things to her need! Even poetry itself, she uses, as one more of the bits of cheese wherewith to bait the trap she sets for the unsuspecting feet of the man and maid as yet unattached. The dance went on. The music roared about them, but they did not hear. They talked of life and death, the common subjects of gossip of the young. He showed her his ambition, and she fed it, as she might have a pet dog he had displayed. Finally he spoke in a hushed voice: " I could be the greatest poet in the world," he said, "if " " If what? " Bettina breathed. " If I had you." There was a silence. " Oh, don't you think you could, anyway? " she asked, distressed. But it appeared that he could not. " You make me feel things freshly again. I see the world with the eyes of a child! You make everything alive, because you are so alive yourself!" " I'm very glad," said Bettina, modestly. " As soon as I saw you " he began. " I, too," confessed Bettina. They gazed at each other. Pierrots and blue-painted Egyptians jostled them, but they paid no heed. " To live near the springs of beauty always, to feel the rhythm of life," said he. " Yes," said Bettina. How right she had been to extricate herself from William's engagement ring. Why, William had no conception of things like this. She felt beauty laving her like a pool in which one bathed, making her a part of it. She seemed to breathe in the atmosphere of poetry. She was sure that she felt the rhythm of life. It was a delicious feeling, something like being saved by an evangelist at camp-meeting. " If we hadn't met," said the poet, awed. Her eyes grew dark with the horror of it. " You are the loveliest thing," he began. "Hadn't we bette...