"Imagine a _roue_ of forty-five who is married; incorrigible, of course, Frank, a great noble who gets the person he is in love with to come and stay with him in the country.
One evening his wife, who has gone upstairs to lie down with a headache, is behind a screen in a room half asleep; she is awakened by her husband's courting.

She cannot move, she is bound breathless to her couch; she hears everything.

Then, Frank, the husband comes to the door and finds it locked, and knowing that his wife is inside with the host, beats upon the door and will have entrance, and while the guilty ones whisper together--the woman blaming the man, the man trying to think of some excuse, some way out of the net--the wife gets up very quietly and turns on the lights while the two cowards stare at her with wild surmise.

She passes to the door and opens it and the husband rushes in to find his hostess as well as the host and his wife.

I think it is a great scene, Frank, a great stage picture." "It is," I said, "a great scene; why don't you write it ?" "Perhaps I shall, Frank, one of these days, but now I am thinking of some poetry, a 'Ballad of a Fisher Boy,' a sort of companion to 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol,' in which I sing of liberty instead of prison, joy instead of sorrow, a kiss instead of an execution.