Today's Stichomancy for Charlton Heston

we must combat unworthiness. Was your attitude towards me less unworthy?"

"I'll make amends for it if you'll come home," said he.

"My home is here. You cannot compel me."

"I should be loath to," he admitted, sighing.

"You cannot," she insisted.

"I think I can," said he. "There is a law.."

"A law that will hang you if you invoke it," she cut in quickly. "This much can I safely promise you.

She had need to say no more to tell him everything. At all times half a word was as much to Mr. Wilding as a whole sentence to another. She saw the tightening of his lips, the hardening of his eyes, beyond

Thought characters and words, merely but art, And bastards of his foul adulterate heart.

'And long upon these terms I held my city, Till thus he 'gan besiege me: Gentle maid, Have of my suffering youth some feeling pity, And be not of my holy vows afraid: That's to you sworn, to none was ever said; For feasts of love I have been call'd unto, Till now did ne'er invite, nor never woo.

'All my offences that abroad you see Are errors of the blood, none of the mind;

in Genereau's saloon, or hug the plump little French girls at Chevalier's dances, and sometimes, of a summer night, he even went across the dewy cornfields and through the wild-plum thicket to play the fiddle for Lena Hanson, whose name was a reproach through all the Divide country, where the women are usually too plain and too busy and too tired to depart from the ways of virtue. On such occasions Lena, attired in a pink wrapper and silk stockings and tiny pink slippers, would sing to him, accompanying herself on a battered guitar. It gave him a delicious sense of freedom and experience to be with a woman who, no matter how, had lived in big cities and knew the ways of town folk, who had never worked in the

The Troll Garden and Selected Stories

Catholic Church. He felt, as indeed I think we all must feel, that the Sonnets are addressed to an individual, - to a particular young man whose personality for some reason seems to have filled the soul of Shakespeare with terrible joy and no less terrible despair.

'Having in this manner cleared the way as it were, Cyril asked me to dismiss from my mind any preconceived ideas I might have formed on the subject, and to give a fair and unbiassed hearing to his own theory. The problem he pointed out was this: Who was that young man of Shakespeare's day who, without being of noble birth or even of noble nature, was addressed by him in terms of such passionate adoration that we can but wonder at the strange worship, and are