James: Violet, you make light of it, but the days truly did pass faster this summer. One scarcely noticed the mornings, for they were gone almost at once—dissolved in the clatter of trains, in the shuffle of paper, in that quiet tyranny of the desk. Is it not strange that, when I was a boy, summers seemed to swell like Homeric epics—every day a long voyage, every evening a discovery?
Violet: My dear, if I may be perfectly frank, you are in danger of drowning in your own metaphors. You describe a train timetable as though it were the fall of Troy. Believe me, no one in history has ever died of early mornings and clerical work, though I suspect many have died of boredom listening to men complain about them.
James: Perhaps. But I cannot help how the city weighs on me. The sky itself appeared a theater, its clouds cavorting with the grandeur of gods. Yet now, in London, the sun scarcely lingers; it peers over chimneys and sooty eaves, then vanishes, as though ashamed of our unyielding industry.
Violet: Oh, for heaven’s sake. The sun is not sulking—it’s setting. Get a grip.
James: That may sound dramatic, but it gnaws at me. What becomes of time when one’s life is measured out not in adventures but in ledgers, not in battles fought but in hours sat? Childhood summers—those great symphonies of cricket on the lawn, salt upon the lips at Brighton, the reckless leap into rivers—stand now like marble statues in the gallery of memory.
Violet: And how very marble they must be, since you’ve carved them with such insufferable detail. James, dear, childhood seemed long because you were too small to reach the clock. Time has not betrayed you—you’ve simply noticed it exists. A shocking revelation, I’m sure, but not one that requires a Homeric lament.
James: I don’t deny it sounds sentimental. Still, I sometimes believe those memories stir when I am not looking—that if I were to turn suddenly I might catch the stone boy lifting his bat again, or see the carved swimmer fling himself into some hidden tide.
Violet: Good heavens. Now even your statues are more active than you.
James: Call me fanciful if you wish, but I feel it keenly. London itself conspires. Its shadows are never empty. One hears laughter rising from Kensington Gardens, echoing long after the children have gone. Couples drifting along the Embankment might be lovers—or merely semblances of lovers, repeating steps from long-forgotten evenings. I, meanwhile, remain indoors, bent over figures that mock the very notion of eternity.
Violet: Conspires? London? My dear boy, London cannot even manage drainage without catastrophe. The city is not plotting against you; it is ignoring you entirely—which, frankly, is the only sensible course of action. You imagine shadows whispering and gardens brooding because you cannot endure the fact that the world continues quite happily without consulting you. And as for your ledgers mocking you—well, I don’t doubt they do. If I were a column of numbers condemned to your company, I should laugh too, though perhaps more out of despair than amusement. You speak as though eternity is mocked by your desk. I assure you, eternity has never heard of you, your desk, or your dreary summers. The Thames will go on glittering long after you’ve finished sulking into your inkpot, and the city’s children will keep laughing without pausing to see if James has managed to finish balancing his accounts or penning his latest tragedy about a sunny day. You’re not the victim of a conspiracy, James—you are the victim of your own tedium. And I assure you, no one else is suffering from it half so much as I am at this very moment.
James: That is cruel, Violet—even for you. I may be guilty of melancholy, but I am not some useless idler. If I dwell on the weight of London, it is only because it presses so heavily upon me. Summer, once a sovereign, is reduced here to a whisper through an open window, the scent of plane-trees mingling with petrol fumes.
Violet: Then shut the window. Or better still, go through it.
James: You’ll dismiss me, I know, but there is truth in it. Perhaps there is consolation in this brevity. If joy cannot be prolonged, neither can despair. We must learn to find our summers in the small intervals: a shaft of sunlight upon the Thames, the toll of St. Paul’s, the rare evening when the sky deepens to that impossible blue.
Violet: Oh, James. You speak of intervals as though they were treasures, yet you squander every one of them rehearsing your obituary for the weather. You could have had three walks, two conversations, and at least one tolerable glass of sherry in the time it took you to describe the Thames like some moody oracle. Life is not withholding beauty from you—you are hiding from it, sulking like a boy at the edge of the playground. For heaven’s sake, do something before your grand adventure becomes nothing more than a very long whimper.
In short, stop whining and fetch your hat.