distinguished than the others has been to Paris. We go to Paris
with baskets on our backs, and sticks in our hands, and bring back what
we can pick up. And having lived immersed in art till you're forty, you
return to the Catholic Celt! Your biographer will be puzzled to explain
this last episode, and, however he may explain it, it will seem a
discrepancy."

"I suppose one should think of one's biographer."

"It will be more like yourself to get Asher to land you at one of the
Italian ports. We will go to Perugia and see Raphael's first frescoes,
done when he was sixteen, and the town itself climbing down into
ravines. The streets are lonely at midday, but towards evening a breeze
blows up from both seas--Italy is very narrow there--and the people
begin to come out; and from the battlements one sees the lights of
Assisi glimmering through the dusk."

"I may never see Italy. Go on talking. I like to hear you talk about
Italy."

"There are more beautiful things in Italy than in the rest of the world
put together, and there is nothing so beautiful as Italy. Just fancy a
man like you never having seen the Campagna. I remember opening my
shutters one morning in August at Frascati. The poisonous mists lay
like clouds, but the sun came out and shone through them, and the wind
drove them before it, and every moment a hill appeared, and the great
aqueducts, and the tombs, and the wild grasses at the edge of the tombs
waving feverishly; and here and there a pine, or group of pines with
tufted heads, like Turner used to draw.... The plain itself is so
shapely. Rome lies like a little dot in the middle of it, and it is
littered with ruins. The great tomb of Cecilia Metella is there, built
out of blocks of stone as big as an ordinary room. He must have loved
her very much to raise such a tomb to her memory, and she must have
been a wonderful woman." Rodney paused a moment and then he said: "The
walls of the tombs are let in with sculpture, and there are seats for
wayfarers, and they will last as long as the world,--they are
ever-lasting."

"Of one thing I'm sure," said Harding. "I must get out of London. I
can't bear its ugliness any longer."

The two men crossed Piccadilly, and Harding told Rodney Asher's reason
for leaving London.

"He says he is subject to nightmares, and lately he has been waking up
in the middle of the night thinking that London and Liverpool had
joined. Asher is right. No town ought to be more than fi