The Poet in Parliament by G.K. Chesterton — Read

DURING the singular entrance and exit of Dorian Wimpole, M. P., J. P., / etc., Lady Joan was looking out of the magic casements of that turret / room which was now literally, and not only poetically, the last limit of / Ivywood House. The old broken hole and black staircase up which the lost / dog Quoodle used to come and go, had long ago been sealed up and / cemented with a wall of exquisite Eastern workmanship. All through the / patterns Lord Ivywood had preserved and repeated the principle that no / animal shape must appear. But, like all lucid dogmatists, he perceived / all the liberties his dogma allowed him. And he had irradiated this / remote end of Ivywood with sun and moon and solar and starry systems, / with the Milky Way for a dado and a few comets for comic relief. The / thing was well done of its kind (as were all the things that Phillip / Ivywood got done for him); and if all the windows of the turret were / closed with their peacock curtains, a poet with anything like a Hibbsian / appreciation of the family champagne might almost fancy he was looking / out across the sea on a night crowded with stars. And (what was yet more / important) even Misysra (that exact thinker) could not call the moon a / live animal without falling into idolatry.

But Joan, looking out of real windows on a real sky and sea, thought no / more about the astronomical wall-paper than about any other wall-paper. / She was asking herself in sullen emotionalism, and for the thousandth / time, a question she had never been able to decide. It was the final / choice between an ambition and a memory. And there was this heavy weight / in the scale: that the ambition would probably materialise, and the / memory probably wouldn't. It has been the same weight in the same scale / a million times, since Satan became the prince of this world. But the / evening stars were strengthening over the old sea-shore, and they also / wanted weighing like diamonds.