The clear strong June sunshine streamed in through the window and turned the white of the poet's page to a dazzling silver splendour.
"Hang it all!" he cried, and he threw down the yellow-brown penholder. "It's too much! It's not to be borne! It's not human!"
He turned out his pockets. Two-and-seven-pence. He could draw the price of an ode and a roundelay from the Spectator—but not to-day, for this was a Bank Holiday, Whit Monday, in fact. Then he thought of his tobacco jar. Sure enough, there lurked some halfpence among the mossy shag, and—oh, wonder and joy and cursed carelessness for ever to be blessed—a gleaming coy half-sovereign. In the ticket-pocket of his overcoat a splendid unforeseen shilling—a florin and a sixpence in the velveteen jacket he had not worn since last year. Ten—and two—and one—and two and sevenpence and sixpence—sixteen shillings and a penny. Enough, more than enough, to take him out of this world of burst horsehair chairs and greedy foolscap, of arid authorship and burst bubbles of dreams to the real world, where spring, still laughing, shrank from the kisses of summer, where white may blossomed and thrushes sang.
"I'll have a holiday," he said, "who knows—I may get an idea for a poem!"
He cleaned his boots with ink; they were not shiny after it, but they were at least black. He put on his last clean shirt and the greeny-blue Liberty tie that his sister had sent him for his April birthday. He brushed his soft hat—counted his money again—found for it a pocket still lacking holes—and went out whistling. The front door slammed behind him with a cheerful conclusive bang.
From the top of an omnibus he noted the town gilded with June sunlight. And it was very good.
He bought food, and had it packed in decent brown paper, so that it looked like something superfluous from the stores.
And he caught the ten something train to Halstead. He only just caught it.
He blundered into a third-class carriage, and nearly broke his neck over an umbrella which lay across the door like an amateur trap for undesired company.