"My poor Jurgen, you who were once a poet! she was your masterpiece.
For there was only a shallow, stupid and airy, high-nosed and
light-haired miss, with no remarkable good looks,--and consider what
your ingenuity made from such poor material! You should be proud of
yourself."

"No, Centaur, I cannot very well be proud of my folly: yet I do not
regret it. I have been befooled by a bright shadow of my own
raising, you tell me, and I concede it to be probable. No less, I
served a lovely shadow; and my heart will keep the memory of that
loveliness until life ends, in a world where other men follow
pantingly after shadows which are not even pretty."

"There is something in that, Jurgen: there is also something in an
old tale we used to tell in Thessaly, about a fox and certain
grapes."

"Well, but look you, Nessus, there is an emperor that reigns now in
Constantinople and occasionally does business with me. Yes, and I
could tell you tales of by what shifts he came to the throne--"

"Men's hands are by ordinary soiled in climbing," quoth the Centaur.

"And 'Jurgen,' this emperor says to me, not many months ago, as he
sat in his palace, crowned and dreary and trying to cheat me out of
my fair profit on some emeralds,--'Jurgen, I cannot sleep of nights,
because of that fool Alexius, who comes into my room with staring
eyes and the bowstring still about his neck. And my Varangians must
be in league with that silly ghost, because I constantly order them