Alas and alas! I am engaged—an engagement according to Hoyle, sanctioned by poppa and sealed with a solitaire—irrevocably, overwhelmingly, engaged.
Who would have dreamed it? But in the great round-up of matrimony, isn’t it always the unexpected that happens? I was run down, roped, thrown, before I knew what was happening to me. And the brand on me is “Guinivere Chumley Grace.”
She is the youngest, the open-airiest, the most super-strenuous of the sporting sisters. She slays foxes, slaughters pheasants, has even made an air-flight. I have no doubt she despises poor, ordinary women who cook steaks, darn socks and take an intelligent interest in babies.
And this is the girl I am going to marry, I who hate horse-flesh, would not slay a blue-bottle promenading on my nose, admire the domestic virtues, and hope that a woman will never cease to scream at the sight of a mouse. Can it be wondered at that I am in the depths of despair?
And it is all the fault of Italy?
Naples sprang at me, and, as we say, “put it all over me.” Such welters of colourful life! Such visions of joy and dirt! Such hot-beds of rank-growing humanity! Diving boys and piratical longshoremen; plumed guardians of the police and ragged lazzaroni; whooping donkey drivers and pestiferous guides; clamour, colour, confusion, all to bewilder my prim Manhattan mind.
What a disappointment that had been; to stand there one exultant moment with the Trail of Beautiful Adventure glimmering before; the next, to be hemmed in by the jubilant Chumley Graces, and hurried to the haughtiest of hotels, where poppa insisted on cashing my cheque for five hundred dollars.
But resignation to one’s fate is comparatively easy in Naples. There, where villa and vineyard dream by an amethystine sea where purple Capri and violet Vesuvius shimmer and change with every mood of sun and breeze, the line of least resistance seems alluringly appropriate.
There were days in which (accompanied by Miss Guinivere Chumley Grace) I roamed the Via Roma, stimulated by the vivid life that seethed around me; when I watched the bronze fishermen pull in their long, sea-curving nets; when the laziness of the lazzaroni fell upon me.
There were evenings in which (accompanied by Guinivere Chumley Grace) I sat on the terrace of the hotel, caressed by the balmy breeze, listening to the far-borne melody of mandolins, and gazing at the topaz lights that fringed the throbbing vast of foam and starlight.