This figure was clad in tweeds of a piebald check, with a pink tie,
a sharp collar and protuberant yellow boots. He contrived,
in the true tradition of 'Arry at Margate, to look at once startling
and commonplace. But as the Cockney apparition drew nearer,
Muscari was astounded to observe that the head was distinctly
different from the body. It was an Italian head: fuzzy, swarthy and
very vivacious, that rose abruptly out of the standing collar
like cardboard and the comic pink tie. In fact it was a head he knew.
He recognized it, above all the dire erection of English holiday array,
as the face of an old but forgotten friend name Ezza. This youth
had been a prodigy at college, and European fame was promised him
when he was barely fifteen; but when he appeared in the world he failed,
first publicly as a dramatist and a demagogue, and then privately
for years on end as an actor, a traveller, a commission agent
or a journalist. Muscari had known him last behind the footlights;
he was but too well attuned to the excitements of that profession,
and it was believed that some moral calamity had swallowed him up.

"Ezza!" cried the poet, rising and shaking hands in
a pleasant astonishment. "Well, I've seen you in many costumes
in the green room; but I never expected to see you dressed up
as an Englishman."

"This," answered Ezza gravely, "is not the costume of an Englishman,
but of the Italian of the future."

"In that case," remarked Muscari, "I confess I prefer
the Italian of the past."