stepped into a written comedy.

More especially this attractive unreality fell upon it about
nightfall, when the extravagant roofs were dark against the
afterglow and the whole insane village seemed as separate as a
drifting cloud. This again was more strongly true of the many
nights of local festivity, when the little gardens were often
illuminated, and the big Chinese lanterns glowed in the dwarfish
trees like some fierce and monstrous fruit. And this was strongest
of all on one particular evening, still vaguely remembered in the
locality, of which the auburn-haired poet was the hero. It was not
by any means the only evening of which he was the hero. On many
nights those passing by his little back garden might hear his high,
didactic voice laying down the law to men and particularly to
women. The attitude of women in such cases was indeed one of the
paradoxes of the place. Most of the women were of the kind vaguely
called emancipated, and professed some protest against male
supremacy. Yet these new women would always pay to a man the
extravagant compliment which no ordinary woman ever pays to him,
that of listening while he is talking. And Mr. Lucian Gregory, the
red-haired poet, was really (in some sense) a man worth listening
to, even if one only laughed at the end of it. He put the old cant
of the lawlessness of art and the art of lawlessness with a certain
impudent freshness which gave at least a momentary pleasure. He was
helped in some degree by the arresting oddity of his appearance,
which he worked, as the phrase goes, for all it was worth. His dark
red hair parted in the middle was literally like a woman's, and
curved into the slow curls of a virgin in a pre-Raphaelite picture.
From within this almost saintly oval, however, his face projected
suddenly broad and brutal, the chin carried forward with a look of