Bills came in by every post, but their ability to vex him had vanished in the promise his manuscript gave of a speedy defeat of all material difficulties. The reaction from the strain of decking his poems with the final touches that were to precede the trial of public judgment gave place to dreams. A dozen times Guy followed the manuscript step by step of its journey from the moment the insentient mail-cart carried it away from Wychford to the moment when Mr. William Worrall threw a first casual glance to where it lay waiting for his perusal on the desk in the Covent Garden office. Guy saw the office-boy send off the formal post-card of acknowledgment that he had already received; and in his dream he rather pitied the youth for his unconsciousness of what a treasure he was acknowledging merely in the ordinary routine of a morning's work. Perhaps the packet would lie unopened for two or three days—in fact, probably Mr. Worrall might not yet have resumed work, as they say, after a short Christmas vacation. Moreover, when he came back to business, although at Guy's request for sponsors the poems had been vouched for by one or two reputed friends of the publisher with whom he was acquainted; he would no doubt still be inclined to postpone their examination. Then one morning he would almost inadvertently cut the string and glance idly at a page, and then....

At this point the author's mental visions varied. Sometimes Worrall would be so deeply transfixed by the revelation of a new planet swimming into ken that he would sit spellbound at his own good fortune, not emerging from a trance of delight until he sent a telegram inviting the poet to come post-haste to town and discuss terms. In other dreams the publisher would distrust his own judgment and take the manuscript under his arm to a critic of taste, anxiously watching his face and, as an expression of admiration gradually diffused itself, knowing that his own wild surmise had been true. There were many other variations of the first reception of the poems, but they all ended in the expenditure of sixpence on a telegram. Here the dream would amplify itself; and proofs, binding, paper, danced before Guy's vision; while soon afterwards the first reviews were coming in. At this stage the poet's triumph assumed a hundred shapes and diversities, and ultimately he could never decide between a leader on his work in The Times headed A New Genius or an eulogy 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 £300 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 should be sirenian moons and dawns, and life would be this dream's perfect fulfilment. In what loggia, firefly-haunted, would he hold her? The desire with which the picture flamed upon his imagination was almost intolerable, and here he always brought her back to Plashers Mead on a June dusk. Then she could be conjured in this house, summoned in spirit here to this very room; and if they had loved Italy, how they would love England as they walked across their meadows, husband and wife! With such visions Guy set on fire each January night that floated frorely into his bedroom, until one morning a letter arrived from Mr. William Worrall that made his fingers tremble as he broke the envelope and read the news:

217 Covent Garden, W.C.,
January 6th.

Dear Sir,—I have looked at the poems you were kind enough to send for my consideration, and I shall be happy to hand them to a reader for his opinion. The reader's fee is one guinea. Should his opinion be favorable, I shall be glad to discuss terms with you.

Yours faithfully,
William Worrall.

Guy threw the letter down in a rage. He would almost have preferred a flat refusal to this request for money to enable some jaded hack to read his poems. The proposal appeared merely insolent, and he wrote curtly to Mr. William Worrall to demand the immediate return of his manuscript. But after all, if Worrall did not accept his work, who would? Money was an ulterior consideration when the great object was to receive such unanimous approval as would justify the apparent waste of time in which he had been indulging. The moment his father acknowledged the right he had to be confident, he in turn would try to show by following his father's advice that he was not the wrong-headed idler of his reputation. Perhaps he would send the guinea to Worrall. He tore up his first letter and wrote another in which a cheque was inclosed. Then he began to add up the counterfoils of his cheque-book, a depressing operation that displayed an imminent financial crisis. He had overdrawn £5 last quarter. That left £32 10s. of the money paid in on December 21st. The quarter's rent was £4 10s. That left £28. Miss Peasey's wages were in arrears, and he must pay her £4 10s. on the fifteenth of this month. That would leave £23 10s., and he must knock off 7s. 6d. for Bob's license. About £3 had gone at Christmas and there were the books still to pay. Twenty pounds was not much for current expenses until next Lady Day. However, he decided that he could manage in Wychford, if he did not have to pay out money for Oxford debts, the creditors of which were pressing him harder each week.

£s.d.
Lampard.Books.39150
Harker.Furniture.17180
Faucett.Books.22166
Williamson.Books.13190
Ambrose.Books.470
Brough.Tobacco.9190
Clary.Clothes.4440
Miscellaneous.Books, Clothes,
Stationery, Chemist,
etc., etc. about £50

A total of £202 18s. 6d. Practically he might say that £200 would clear everything. Yet was £50 enough to allow for those miscellaneous accounts? Here, for instance, was a bill of £11 for boots and another of £14 for hats, apparently, though how the deuce he could have spent all that on hats he did not know. It would be wiser to say that £250 was required to free himself from debt. Guy read through the tradesmen's letters and detected an universal impatience, for they all reminded him that not merely for fifteen months had they received nothing on account of large outstanding bills, but also they made it clear that behind reiterated demands and politeness strained to breaking-point stood darkly the law. That brute Ambrose, to whom, after all, he owed only £4 7s., was the most threatening. In fact, he would obviously have to pay the ruffian in full. That left only £15 13s. for current expenses to Lady Day, or rather £14 12s., for, by the way, Worrall's guinea had been left out of the reckoning.