'If I think beauty, that beauty may
materialise---'
'Must, will, does materialise, Mr. Rogers, just as your improvements
in machinery did. You first thought them out!'
'Then put them into words; yes, and afterwards into metal. Strong
thought is bound to realise itself sooner or later, eh? Isn't it all
grand and splendid?'
They stared at one another across the smoky atmosphere of the London
flat at the hour of one in the morning in the twentieth century.
'And when I think of a Scaffolding of Dusk that builds the Night,'
Rogers went on in a lower tone to himself, yet not so low that Minks,
listening in amazement, did not catch every syllable, 'or of a
Dustman, Sweep, and Lamplighter, of a Starlight Express, or a vast
Star Net that binds the world in sympathy together, and when I weave
all these into a story, whose centre somehow is the Pleiades--all this
is real and actual, and--and---'
'May have been projected by another mind before it floated into your
own,' Minks suddenly interposed almost in a whisper, charmed wholly
into the poet's region by these suggestive phrases, yet wondering a
little why he said it, and particularly how he dared to say it.
His chief turned sharply upon him.
'My own thought exactly!' he exclaimed; 'but how the devil did you
guess it?'
Minks returned the stare with triumph.
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