O these streets of London! There are other more splendid shades in them,—shades that have been there for centuries, and will walk beside us so long as the streets exist. One can never see these shades, save as one goes on foot, or takes that chariot of the humble, the omnibus. I should like to make a map of literary London somewhat after Leigh Hunt's plan, as projected in his essay on the World of Books; for to the book-lover 'the poet's hand is always on the place, blessing it.' One can no more separate the association from the particular spot than one can take away from it any other beauty.
'Fleet Street is always Johnson's Fleet Street' (so Leigh Hunt says); 'the Tower belongs to Julius Caesar, and Blackfriars to Suckling, Vandyke, and the Dunciad...I can no more pass through Westminster without thinking of Milton, or the Borough without thinking of Chaucer and Shakespeare, or Gray's Inn without calling Bacon to mind, or Bloomsbury Square without Steele and Akenside, than I can prefer brick and mortar to wit and poetry, or not see a beauty upon it beyond architecture in the splendour of the recollection.'
Chapter X. Apropos of advertisements.
Francesca wishes to get some old hall-marked silver for her home tea-tray, and she is absorbed at present in answering advertisements of people who have second-hand pieces for sale, and who offer to bring them on approval. The other day, when Willie Beresford and I came in from Westminster Abbey (where we had been choosing the best locations for our memorial tablets), we thought Francesca must be giving a 'small and early'; but it transpired that all the silver-sellers had called at the same hour, and it took the united strength of Dawson and Mr. Beresford, together with my diplomacy, to rescue the poor child from their clutches. She came out alive, but her safety was purchased at the cost of a George IV. cream-jug, an Elizabethan sugar-bowl, and a Boadicea tea-caddy, which were, I doubt not, manufactured in Wardour Street towards the close of the nineteenth century.
Salemina came in just then, cold and tired. (Tower and National Gallery the same day. It's so much more work to go to the Tower nowadays than it used to be!) We had intended to take a sail to Richmond on a penny steamboat, but it was drizzling, so we had a cosy fire instead, slipped into our tea-gowns, and ordered tea and thin bread-and-butter, a basket of strawberries with their frills on, and a jug of Devonshire cream. Willie Beresford asked if he might stay; otherwise, he said, he should have to sit at a cold marble table on the corner of Bond Street and Piccadilly, and take his tea in bachelor solitude.
“Yes,” I said severely, “we will allow you to stay; though, as you are coming to dinner, I should think you would have to go away some time, if only in order that you might get ready to come back. You've been here since breakfast-time.”
“I know,” he answered calmly, “and my only error in judgment was that I didn't take an earlier breakfast, in order to begin my day here sooner. One has to snatch a moment when he can, nowadays; for these rooms are so infested with British swells that a base-born American stands very little chance!”
Now I should like to know if Willie Beresford is in love with Francesca. What shall I do—that is what shall we do—if he is, when she is in love with somebody else? To be sure, she may want one lover for foreign and another for domestic service. He is too old for her, but that is always the way. When Alcides, having gone through all the fatigues of life, took a bride in Olympus, he ought to have selected Minerva, but he chose Hebe.
I wonder why so many people call him 'Willie' Beresford, at his age. Perhaps it is because his mother sets the example; but from her lips it does not seem amiss. I suppose when she looks at him she recalls the past, and is ever seeing the little child in the strong man, mother fashion. It is very beautiful, that feeling; and when a girl surprises it in any mother's eyes it makes her heart beat faster, as in the presence of something sacred, which she can understand only because she is a woman, and experience is foreshadowed in intuition.