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color photograph of two girls in a fancy frame, obliquely inscribed as “The Lady Cressida and thy sweet Nell, Cambridge1919”; I mistook the former for Iris herself in a golden wig and a pink make-up; a closer inspection, however, showed it to be Ivor in the part of that highly irritating girl bobbing in and out of Shakespeare’s flawed farce. But, then, Mnemosyne’s chromodiascope can also become a bore.
    In the music room the boy was now cacophonically dusting the keys of the Bechstein as with less zest I resumed my nudist rambles. He asked me what sounded like
“Hora?
,” and I demonstrated my wrist turning it this way and that to reveal only a pale ghost of watch and watch bracelet. He completely misinterpreted my gesture and turned away shaking his stupid head. It was a morning of errors and failures.
    I made my way to the pantry for a glass or two of wine, the best breakfast in times of distress. In the passage I trod on a shard of crockery (we had heard the crash on the eve) and danced on one foot with a curse as I tried to examine the imaginary gash in the middle of my pale sole.
    The litre of
rouge
I had visualized was there all right, but I could not find a corkscrew in any of the drawers. Between bangs the macaw could be heard crying out something crude and dreary. The postman had come and gone. The editor of
The New Aurora
(
Novaya Zarya
) was afraid (dreadful poltroons, those editors) that his “modest
émigré
venture (
nachinanie
) “could not etc.—a crumpled “etc.” that flew into the garbage pail. Wineless, wrathful, with Ivor’s
Times
under my arm, I slapped up the back stairs to my stuffy room. The rioting in my brain had now started.
    It was then that I resolved, sobbing horribly into my pillow, to preface tomorrow’s proposal of marriage with a confession that might make it unacceptable to my Iris.

7
    If one looked from our garden gate down the asphalted avenue leading through leopard shade to the village some two hundred paces east, one saw the pink cube of the little post office, its green bench in front, its flag above, all this limned with the numb brightness of a color transparency, between the last two plane trees of the twin files marching on both sides of the road.
    On the right (south) side of the avenue, across a marginal ditch, overhung with brambles, the intervals between the mottled trunks disclosed patches of lavender or lucerne and, farther away, the low white wall of a cemetery running parallel to our lane as those things are apt to do. On the left (north) side, through analogous intervals, one glimpsed an expanse of rising ground, a vineyard, a distant farm, pine groves, and the outline of mountains. On the penult tree trunk of that side somebody had pasted, and somebody else partly scraped off, an incoherent notice.
    We walked down that avenue nearly every morning, Iris and I, on our way to the village square and—from there by lovely shortcuts—to Cannice and the sea. Now and then she liked to return on foot, being one of those small but strong lassies who can hurdle, and play hockey, and climb rocks, and then shimmy till any pale mad hour(
“do bezúmnogo blédnogo chása
”—to quote from my first direct poem to her). She usually wore her “Indian” frock, a kind of translucent wrap, over her skimpy swimsuit, and as I followed close behind, and sensed the solitude, the security, the all-permitting dream, I had trouble walking in my bestial state. Fortunately it was not the none-so-very-secure solitude that held me back but a moral decision to confess something very grave before I made love to her.
    As seen from those escarpments, the sea far below spread in majestic wrinkles, and, owing to distance and height, the recurrent line of foam arrived in rather droll slow motion because we knew it was sure, as we had been sure, of its strapping pace, and now that restraint, that stateliness …
    Suddenly there came from somewhere within the natural jumble of our