but in them was one chink,
revealing one star, and through this the smoke escaped into the light
of stars innumerable. Then--but then the vision failed, and the voice of
science whispered that all smoke remains on earth in the form of smuts,
and is troublesome to Mrs. Aberdeen.

"I am jolly unpractical," he mused. "And what is the point of it when
real things are so wonderful? Who wants visions in a world that has
Agnes and Gerald?" He turned on the electric light and pulled open
the table-drawer. There, among spoons and corks and string, he found a
fragment of a little story that he had tried to write last term. It was
called "The Bay of the Fifteen Islets," and the action took place on St.
John's Eve off the coast of Sicily. A party of tourists land on one of
the islands. Suddenly the boatmen become uneasy, and say that the island
is not generally there. It is an extra one, and they had better have tea
on one of the ordinaries. "Pooh, volcanic!" says the leading tourist,
and the ladies say how interesting. The island begins to rock, and so
do the minds of its visitors. They start and quarrel and jabber. Fingers
burst up through the sand-black fingers of sea devils. The island tilts.
The tourists go mad. But just before the catastrophe one man, integer
vitae scelerisque purus, sees the truth. Here are no devils. Other
muscles, other minds, are pulling the island to its subterranean home.
Through the advancing wall of waters he sees no grisly faces, no
ghastly medieval limbs, but--But what nonsense! When real things are so
wonderful, what is the point of pretending?

And so Rickie deflected his enthusiasms. Hitherto they had played on
gods and heroes, on the infinite and the impossible, on virtue and
beauty and strength. Now, with a steadier radiance, they transfigured a
man who was dead and a woman who was still alive.

VII

Love, say orderly people, can be fallen into by two methods: (1) through
the desires, (2) through the imagination. And if the orderly people are
English, they add that (1) is the inferior method, and characteristic
of the South. It is inferior. Yet those who pursue it at all events
know what they want; they are not puzzling to themselves or ludicrous
to others; they do not take the wings of the morning and fly into the
uttermost parts of the sea before walking to the registry office; they
cannot breed a tragedy quite like Rickie's.

He is, of course, absurdly young--not twenty-one and he w