Then Emilia had to hit his sense of humour by giving the words as they came in the run of the song.
"You make me crow, or I croak," she said.
"The woman follows the man, and music fits to verse," cried Tracy.
"Music's the vine, verse the tree." Emilia meditated.

"Not if they grow up together," she suggested, and broke into a smile at his rapture of amusement; which was succeeded by a dark perplexity, worthy of the present aspect of Mr.Pericles.
"That's what has upset us," he said.

"We have been trying to 'grow up together,' like first-cousins, and nature forbids the banns.

To-morrow you shall have half a libretto.

And then, really, my child, you must adapt yourself to the words." "I will," Emilia promised; "only, not if they're like iron to the teeth." "My belief is," said Tracy savagely, "that music's a fashion, and as delusive a growth as Cobbett's potatoes, which will go back to the deadly nightshade, just as music will go back to the tom-tom." "What have you called out when I sang to you!" Emilia reproached him for this irreverent nonsense.
"Oh! it was you and not the music," he returned half-cajolingly, while he beat the tom-tom on air.
"Hark here!" cried Emilia.