our bathing-place in the Grotta del Bovo Marino, where it was our
custom to bathe every day. We swam and splashed one another, and
in that buoyant water I seemed to become something lighter and
stronger than a man. And at last we came out dripping and
rejoicing and raced among the rocks. And then I put on a dry
bathing-dress, and we sat to bask in the sun, and presently I
nodded, resting my head against her knee, and she put her hand upon
my hair and stroked it softly and I dozed. And behold! as it
were with the snapping of the string of a violin, I was awakening,
and I was in my own bed in Liverpool, in the life of to-day.

"Only for a time I could not believe that all these vivid
moments had been no more than the substance of a dream.

"In truth, I could not believe it a dream for all the sobering
reality of things about me. I bathed and dressed as it were by
habit, and as I shaved I argued why I of all men should leave the
woman I loved to go back to fantastic politics in the hard and
strenuous north. Even if Evesham did force the world back to war,
what was that to me? I was a man with the heart of a man, and why
should I feel the responsibility of a deity for the way the world
might go?

"You know that is not quite the way I think about affairs,
about my real affairs. I am a solicitor, you know, with a point of
view.

"The vision was so real, you must understand, so utterly
unlike a dream that I kept perpetually recalling little irrelevant
details; even the ornament of the book-cover that lay on my wife's