"The cook isn't a 'member'!--Well, can't you go on, Moya? Paul seems to
need a lot of editing." Moya had paused and was glancing ahead, smiling to
herself constrainedly.

"Is there more disparagement of his comrades?" Christine persisted.

"Christine, be still!" Mrs. Bogardus interfered. "Moya ought to have the
first reading of her own letter. It's very good of her to let us hear it
at all."

"Oh dear, there's no disparagement. Quite the contrary! I'll go on with
pleasure if you don't mind." Moya read hurriedly, laughing through her
words:--

"'If you were here,
(Ah, _if_ you were here!)
You should lend me an ear--
One at the least
Of a pair the prettiest'--

which is, within a foot or two, the rhythm of 'Wood Notes.' Of course you
don't know it!"

"This is a gibe at me," Moya explained, "because I don't read Emerson. 'It
is the very measure of a marching chorus,' he goes on to say, 'where the
step is broken by rocks and tree-roots;'--and he is chanting it to himself
(to her it was in the original) as they go in single file through these
'haughty solitudes, the twilight of the gods!'"