‘But you said you would tell us something about England.’
‘I mean a holiday in modern Rome; and modern Rome, you know, is on the banks of the Thames.’
‘That would do perfectly. Would you like to sit in my bedroom, and collect your thoughts?’
‘He will collect nothing there, but stones and bones,’ says Victoria, who has lingered with us. ‘He wants watching, if you are to get any work out of him. Nobody can manage him, but me. Come, sir, come along!’
One may be in leading like a bear, or like a man of genius; and I hope I am not a bear. My leader makes straight for the Peak, by the grove sacred to her tenderest thoughts. She establishes me on the ruins of the platform, solitary now, for it will not be the scene of a lecture for another year. As she leaves me, I receive the order to remain perfectly still, in profitable meditation, until her return. I promise, and I perform. I throw myself down on my back, watch the floating billions of light globules that seem to make the substance of the air, and wonder if each of them, all proportions preserved, holds a divine Victoria, and a contemplative Me. What a conception of the infinite in happiness, if it could be so! Then, anon, a light footstep warns me that she is here again; and I leave all speculation for the sweet and sufficient certainty that the larger globule holds us two. She has a basket of fruit in her hand; but is it Flora or is it Minerva? The emblems are confusing, for a pencil and a little note-book lie on the top of the store. The bananas and the guavas are to make a lunch for the lonely thinker; the pencil and the paper are to preserve his precious thoughts for the lecture, ere they fly away. I stretch out an eager hand for the eatables, but she offers me the pencil first.
‘Put down what you have been thinking about while I was away.’
How doubly delicious it would be if there were but a shade of coquetry in it; but there is not—not the shadow of a shade.
‘I have been thinking about the Infinite.’
‘What a waste of time! I thought it was to be about Roman Holidays.’
‘It! What? Oh, the lecture. Yes.’