"Her as Venus Reclining. Canova's work, apt for the hallway of a whorehouse. To be played on by any wind that blows, gale, zephyr, postcenal eructation." He paused to take in shallow breaths while Elton looked puzzled. "Can they be disjointed, disjuncted, disjunketed?"

"What?" They turned, in Pauline's far wake, towards the Spanish Steps.

"Love and the animal ecstasy."

"It is ennobled," said Lieutenant Elton RE, "by love. It ceases to be animal and becomes divine."

"In what bad poet did you read that?"

"I read no poetry. I read only engineering manuals and the Holy Bible."

"And Marmaduke said unto Isaac: Get thee gone and build thee an earthworm, earthwork I would say. And lo it was done and earth did quake with the work thereof."

"I think you laugh at me much of the time."

"Kindly, though. You will admit kindly." They started going down the Steps. "And talking of kindly, would it not be a kindly act to accost the Divine Pauline and speak of her brother, saying he is well and digging hard?"

"He is not well. They say he will be dead this time next year." And then: "Accost. I will keep out of the way of her accosting."

"You will be no accostermonger."

"You laugh at me much of the time."

They had come all the way down the Steps, quieter now than in the daytime, and John led Elton to the Barcaccia, whose water music could, with the evening stilling of the piazza, be clearly heard. "This," John said, "tries to sing me to sleep."

"You really are a poetical sort of fellow. And you have really brought out a book?"

"Alas."

Elton chuckled uneasily. "Will we meet tomorrow?"

"Under the ilexes. I've been searching for a rhyme for ilex. We have a terrible language for rhymes, Isaac Marmaduke. It makes poetical engineering most difficult. Here the people shout in rhyme without reason. Put on your armour, duke, be calmer, duke, cried Marmaduke. We're always being betrayed into comedy. You see how difficult it all is. From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step."