ulogy on the principal page of _The Daily Mail_ that galloped neck and
neck for a column alongside one of The Letters of an Englishman. The
former would bestow the greater honor; the latter would be more
profitable; therefore in moments of unbridled optimism he was apt to
allot both proclamations to his fortune. With such an inauguration of
fame the rest was easy dreaming. His father would take a train to
Shipcot on the same morning; if he read _The Times_ at breakfast he
would catch the eleven o'clock from Galton and, traveling by way of
Basingstoke, reach Shipcot by half past two. Practically one might dream
that before tea he would have settled L300 a year on his son, so that
the pleasant news could be announced to the Rectory that very afternoon.
In that case he and Pauline could be married in April; and actually on
her twenty-first birthday she would be his wife. They would not go to
the Campagna this year, because these bills must be paid, unless his
father, in an access of pride due to his having bought several more
eulogies at bookstalls along the line, offered to pay all debts up to
the day of his wedding; in which case they could go to the Campagna:

I wonder do you feel to-day
As I have felt since, hand in hand,
We sat down on the grass, to stray
In spirit better through the land,
This morn of Rome and May?

They would drive out from the city along the Appian Way and turn aside
to sit among the ghostliness of innumerable grasses in those primal
fields, the air of which would be full of the feathery seeds and the dry
scents of that onrushing Summer. There would be no thought of time and
no need for words; there would merely be the two of them on a morn of
Rome and May. And later in the warm afternoon they would drive home,
coming back to the city's heart to eat their dinner within sound of the
Roman fountains. Then all the night-time she would be his, not his in
frightened gasps as when wintry England was forbidding all joy to their
youth, but his endlessly, utterly, gloriously. They would travel farther
south and perhaps come to that Parthenopean shore calling to him still
now from the few days he had spent upon its silver heights and beside
its azure waters. In his dream Pauline was leaning on his shoulder
beneath an Aleppo pine, at the cliff's edge--Pauline, whose alien
freshness would bring a thought of England to sigh through its boughs,
and a cooler world to the aromatic drought. Theirs s