"My! for a poet, delicately attuned and all the rest of it, you can
make unlovely noises. My ear-drums are pierced. You outwhistle -
"

"Orpheus."

"I was about to say a street-arab," she concluded severely.

"Poesy does not prevent one from being practical - at least it
doesn't prevent ME. Mine is no futility of genius that can't sell
gems to the magazines."

He assumed a mock extravagance, and went on:

"I am no attic singer, no ballroom warbler. And why? Because I am
practical. Mine is no squalor of song that cannot transmute
itself, with proper exchange value, into a flower-crowned cottage,
a sweet mountain-meadow, a grove of red-woods, an orchard of
thirty-seven trees, one long row of blackberries and two short rows
of strawberries, to say nothing of a quarter of a mile of gurgling
brook. I am a beauty-merchant, a trader in song, and I pursue
utility, dear Madge. I sing a song, and thanks to the magazine
editors I transmute my song into a waft of the west wind sighing
through our redwoods, into a murmur of waters over mossy stones
that sings back to me another song than the one I sang and yet the
same song wonderfully - er - transmuted."

"O that all your song-transmutations were as successful!" she
laughed.