dreams."

"No," he answered. "But that is just what I did. I am a solicitor, you
must understand, in Liverpool, and I could not help wondering what the
clients and business people I found myself talking to in my office would
think if I told them suddenly I was in love with a girl who would be born
a couple of hundred years or so hence, and worried about the politics of
my great-great-great-grandchildren. I was chiefly busy that day
negotiating a ninety-nine-year building lease. It was a private builder in
a hurry, and we wanted to tie him in every possible way. I had an
interview with him, and he showed a certain want of temper that sent me to
bed still irritated. That night I had no dream. Nor did I dream the next
night, at least, to remember.

"Something of that intense reality of conviction vanished. I began to feel
sure it _was_ a dream. And then it came again.

"When the dream came again, nearly four days later, it was very different.
I think it certain that four days had also elapsed _in_ the dream.
Many things had happened in the north, and the shadow of them was back
again between us, and this time it was not so easily dispelled. I began, I
know, with moody musings. Why, in spite of all, should I go back, go back
for all the rest of my days, to toil and stress, insults, and perpetual
dissatisfaction, simply to save hundreds of millions of common people,
whom I did not love, whom too often I could not do other than despise,
from the stress and anguish of war and infinite misrule? And, after all, I
might fail. _They_ all sought their own narrow ends, and why should
not I--why should not I also live as a man? And out of such thoughts her
voice summoned me, and I lifted my eyes.

"I found myself awake and walking. We had come out above the Pleasure
City, we were near the summit of Monte Solaro and looking towards the bay.
It was the late afternoon and very clear. Far away to the left Ischia hung
in a golden haze between sea and sky, and Naples was coldly white against
the hills, and before us was Vesuvius with a tall and slender streamer
feathering at last towards the south, and the ruins of Torre dell'
Annunziata and Castellammare glittering and near."

I interrupted suddenly: "You have been to Capri, of course?"

"Only in this dream," he said, "only in this dream. All across the bay
beyond Sorrento were the floating palaces of the Pleasure City moored and
chained. And northward were the broad floating stages