News From Nowhere, Or, an Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters From a Utopian Romance

“How shall we divide?  Won’t you go into Ellen’s boat, Dick, since, without offence to our guest, you are the better sculler?”

Dick stood up and laid his hand on her shoulder, and said: “No, no; let Guest try what he can do—he ought to be getting into training now.  Besides, we are in no hurry: we are not going far above Oxford; and even if we are benighted, we shall have the moon, which will give us nothing worse of a night than a greyer day.”

“Besides,” said I, “I may manage to do a little more with my sculling than merely keeping the boat from drifting down stream.”

They all laughed at this, as if it had a been very good joke; and I thought that Ellen’s laugh, even amongst the others, was one of the pleasantest sounds I had ever heard.

To be short, I got into the new-come boat, not a little elated, and taking the sculls, set to work to show off a little.  For—must I say it?—I felt as if even that happy world were made the happier for my being so near this strange girl; although I must say that of all the persons I had seen in that world renewed, she was the most unfamiliar to me, the most unlike what I could have thought of.  Clara, for instance, beautiful and bright as she was, was not unlike a very pleasant and unaffected young lady; and the other girls also seemed nothing more than specimens of very much improved types which I had known in other times.  But this girl was not only beautiful with a beauty quite different from that of “a young lady,” but was in all ways so strangely interesting; so that I kept wondering what she would say or do next to surprise and please me.  Not, indeed, that there was anything startling in what she actually said or did; but it was all done in a new way, and always with that indefinable interest and pleasure of life, which I had noticed more or less in everybody, but which in her was more marked and more charming than in anyone else that I had seen.

We were soon under way and going at a fair pace through the beautiful reaches of the river, between Bensington and Dorchester.  It was now about the middle of the afternoon, warm rather than hot, and quite windless; the clouds high up and light, pearly white, and gleaming, softened the sun’s burning, but did not hide the pale blue in most places, though they seemed to give it height and consistency; the sky, in short, looked really like a vault, as poets have sometimes called it, and not like mere limitless air, but a vault so vast and full of light that it did not in any way oppress the spirits.  It was the sort of afternoon that Tennyson must have been thinking about, when he said of the Lotos-Eaters’ land that it was a land where it was always afternoon.

Ellen leaned back in the stern and seemed to enjoy herself thoroughly.  I could see that she was really looking at things and let nothing escape her, and as I watched her, an uncomfortable feeling that she had been a little touched by love of the deft, ready, and handsome Dick, and that she had been constrained to follow us because of it, faded out of my mind; since if it had been so, she surely could not have been so excitedly pleased, even with the beautiful scenes we were passing through.  For some time she did not say much, but at last, as we had passed under Shillingford Bridge (new built, but somewhat on its old lines), she bade me hold the boat while she had a good look at the landscape through the graceful arch.  Then she turned about to me and said:

“I do not know whether to be sorry or glad that this is the first time that I have been in these reaches.  It is true that it is a great pleasure to see all this for the first time; but if I had had a year or two of memory of it, how sweetly it would all have mingled with my life, waking or dreaming!  I am so glad Dick has been pulling slowly, so as to linger out the time here.  How do you feel about your first visit to these waters?”

I do not suppose she meant a trap for me, but anyhow I fell into it, and said: “My first visit!  It is not my first visit by many a time.  I know these reaches well; indeed, I may say that I know every yard of the Thames from Hammersmith to Cricklade.”

I saw the complications that might follow, as her eyes fixed mine with a curious look in them, that I had seen before at Runnymede, when I had said something which made it difficult for others to understand my present position amongst these people.  I reddened, and said, in order to cover my mistake: “I wonder you have never been up so high as this, since you live on the Thames, and moreover row so well that it would be no great labour to you.  Let alone,” quoth I, insinuatingly, “that anybody would be glad to row you.”

She laughed, clearly not at my compliment (as I am sure she need not have done, since it was a very commonplace fact), but at something which was stirring in her mind; and she still looked at me kindly, but with the above-said keen look in her eyes, and then she said:

“Well, perhaps it is strange, though I have a good deal to do at