He
looked pallid in the light of the reading lamp at his elbow, and his
eyes seemed withdrawn deep into their hollows. He welcomed his visitor
with conventional politeness.
"How's this?" began Larcher. "Do I find you pondering,
'... weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore?'"
"No; merely rambling over familiar fields." Davenport held out the
topmost book.
"Oh, Shakespeare," laughed Larcher. "The Sonnets. Hello, you've marked
part of this."
"Little need to mark anything so famous. But it comes closer to me than
to most men, I fancy." And he recited slowly, without looking down at the
page:
'When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,'--
He stopped, whereupon Larcher, not to be behind, and also without having
recourse to the page, went on:
'Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possest,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,'--
"But I think that hits all men," said Larcher, interrupting himself.
"Everybody has wished himself in somebody else's shoes, now and again,
don't you believe?"
"I have certainly wished myself out of my own shoes," replied Davenport,
almost with vehemence. "I have hated myself and my failures, God knows!
I have wished hard enough that I were not I. But I haven't wished I were
any other person now existing.
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