they could only manage to
gasp out a few mutual endearments amid the buzz and movement, and to
arrange a _rendezvous_ for the end of July. When the day came, he
received a heart-broken letter, stating that her husband had borne her
away to Goodwood. In a postscript she informed him that 'Quicksilver was
a sure thing'. Much correspondence passed without another meeting being
effected, and he lent her five pounds to pay a debt of honour incurred
through her husband's 'absurd confidence in Quicksilver'. A week later
this horsey husband of hers brought her on to Brighton for the races
there, and hither John Lefolle flew. But her husband shadowed her, and
he could only lift his hat to her as they passed each other on the
Lawns. Sometimes he saw her sitting pensively on a chair while her lord
and thrasher perused a pink sporting-paper. Such tantalizing proximity
raised their correspondence through the Hove Post Office to fever heat.
Life apart, they felt, was impossible, and, removed from the sobering
influences of his cap and gown, John Lefolle dreamed of throwing
everything to the winds. His literary reputation had opened out a new
career. The Winifred lyrics alone had brought in a tidy sum, and though
he had expended that and more on despatches of flowers and trifles to
her, yet he felt this extravagance would become extinguished under daily
companionship, and the poems provoked by her charms would go far towards
their daily maintenance. Yes, he could throw up the University. He would
rescue her from this bully, this gentleman bruiser. They would live
openly and nobly in the world's eye. A poet was not even expected to be
conventional.

She, on her side, was no less ardent for the great step. She raged
against the world's law, the injustice by which a husband's cruelty was
not sufficient ground for divorce. 'But we finer souls must take the law
into our own hands,' she wrote. 'We must teach society that the ethics
of a barbarous age are unfitted for our century of enlightenment.' But
somehow the actual time and place of the elopement could never get
itself fixed. In September her husband dragged her to Scotland, in
October after the pheasants. When the dramatic day was actually fixed,
Winifred wrote by the next post deferring it for a week. Even the few
actual preliminary meetings they planned for Kensington Gardens or
Hampstead Heath rarely came off. He lived in a whirling atmosphere of
express letters of excuse, and tel