Love and Mr. Lewisham
will have his five or six languages, a sound, all-round education, a habit of tremendous industry, and be still but four-and-twenty. He will already have honour in his university and ampler means. One realises that those pamphlets in the Liberal interests will be no obscure platitudes. Where Mr. Lewisham will be at thirty stirs the imagination. There will be modifications of the Schema, of course, as experience widens. But the spirit of it—the spirit of it is a devouring flame!     

       He was sitting facing the diamond-framed window, writing, writing fast, on a second yellow box that was turned on end and empty, and the lid was open, and his knees were conveniently stuck into the cavity. The bed was strewn with books and copygraphed sheets of instructions from his remote correspondence tutors. Pursuant to the dangling time-table he was, you would have noticed, translating Latin into English.     

       Imperceptibly the speed of his writing diminished. “Urit me Glycerae nitor” lay ahead and troubled him. “Urit me,”       he murmured, and his eyes travelled from his book out of window to the vicar’s roof opposite and its ivied chimneys. His brows were knit at first and then relaxed. “Urit me!” He had put his pen into his mouth and glanced about for his dictionary. Urare?     

       Suddenly his expression changed. Movement dictionary-ward ceased. He was listening to a light tapping sound—it was a footfall—outside.     

       He stood up abruptly, and, stretching his neck, peered through his unnecessary glasses and the diamond panes down into the street. Looking acutely downward he could see a hat daintily trimmed with pinkish white blossom, the shoulder of a jacket, and just the tips of nose and chin. Certainly the stranger who sat under the gallery last Sunday next the Frobishers. Then, too, he had seen her only obliquely....     

       He watched her until she passed beyond the window frame. He strained to see impossibly round the corner....     

       Then he started, frowned, took his pen from his mouth. “This wandering attention!” he said. “The slightest thing! Where was I? Tcha!” He made a noise with his teeth to express his irritation, sat down, and replaced his knees in the upturned box. “Urit me,”       he said, biting the end of his pen and looking for his dictionary.     


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