"You've made a hit with the agriculturist," said Larcher, as they took their way through a narrow street of old warehouses toward the region of skyscrapers and lower Broadway.
"Scott is evidently his hobby," replied Davenport, with a careless smile, "and I liked to please him in it."
He lapsed into that reticence which, as it was his manner during most of the time, made his strange seasons of communicativeness the more remarkable. A few days passed before another such talkative mood came on in Larcher's presence.
It was a drizzling, cheerless night. Larcher had been to a dinner in Madison Avenue, and he thus found himself not far from Davenport's abode. Going thither upon an impulse, he beheld the artist seated at the table, leaning forward over a confusion of old books, some of them open. He looked pallid in the light of the reading lamp at his elbow, and his eyes seemed withdrawn deep into their hollows.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. I wouldn't change selves with this particular man, or that particular man. It wouldn't be enough to throw off the burden of my memories, with their clogging effect upon my life and conduct, and take up the burden of some other man's--though I should be the gainer even by that, in a thousand cases I could name."