Lance was particularly fond of Mr. Handiman because he had bought fishing-tackle from him ever since he was so-high, hooks for a penny, bright-painted tiger-striped floats for twopence, twenty yards of stout watercord line for sevenpence-ha’penny, even a varnished bamboo rod beautifully dappled with brown and yellow blotches for four-and-sixpence. Moreover, Mr. Handiman had given long credit to generations of small boys, who forgot to pay as often as he forgot to remind them; which was one of the reasons why he was so poor.

“Any luck?” Lance asked him; and Mr. Handiman shook his head.

“It’s close season, Mr. Lance, for everything except eels; and they’re not biting this bright morning. But somehow, just to be beside the river on a day like this, it takes you out of yourself, don’t it?”

“‘Too lovely to be looked on, save only on holy-days,’” said Lance half to himself, thinking of the green-and-gold field with the quicksilver patches of ladies’-smocks.

“Ah, that’s Izaak Walton, that is. My Bible,” smiled Mr. Handiman. “Every time I comes along here in the spring-time I calls it to mind.”

“In a week or two, I suppose, they’ll be putting up the stands,” said Lance, “and then we shan’t see the buttercups. How are the bookings going?”

“Bad; but it’s early yet. And there’s a lot of apathy in the town. They seem more interested in the Beauty Queens than in the Pageant. I sometimes wonder,” added Mr. Handiman, “whether we was altogether wise to mix up Beauty Queens with our History. It don’t seem proper somehow. What does your father think about it, Mr. Lance?”

“Oh, he says we must cater for all tastes. But he’s more concerned about the weather than about Beauty Queens.”

“A very clever gentleman, your father. Last year, a whole month before the event, he said it would be fine for the Bellringers’ Outing; and fine it was. But about this Beauty Competition: what I says is that it makes for bad feeling in the town. There was booing in the cinema when they chose the finalists—booing and catcalls. The young men take sides, you see. I shouldn’t like to be the man who has to judge the final, and that’s a fact!”

“Nor should I,” said Lance, as Mr. Handiman climbed down the steep bank and began to bait his hook with a gross and flaccid worm. “Nor should I; because I think they’re both so beautiful that there’s not a pin to choose between them!”

And indeed that was true; for as Lance continued on his way along the towpath he racked his memory to discover one minute particular in which the charms of Virginia exceeded those of Edna and vice versa; and he could find none. Virginia was a shade the taller, certainly, and she walked with such an airy grace that a man would have to be a Herrick or a Lovelace to do it justice; and she had calm grey eyes and the slender delicacy of a flower, you could compare her with a sprig of the lilac ladies’-smock misty with the dew ! Yes; but Edna with the yellow hair and the high frank breasts and the glowing skin, so that there was a sort of incandescence about her—you had to liken her to those buxom marshmallows which offered themselves so artlessly to the sun. Between ladies’-smocks and kingcups, who could make a judgment? Between Pallas and Aphrodite, who could choose?

It was true that the name “Virginia” was greatly to be preferred to “Edna,” and this might seem to give her a trifling advantage in the eyes of a poet, until one recollected that her surname was Smith, whereas Edna bore the more romantic one of Shirley. Once more the balance was even; by not a minim nor a single hair did the loveliness of the one outweigh the beauty of the other; and when he asked himself which of them he would have beside him now, if Edna could be miraculously translated from the balloon factory where she worked or Virginia from the office of the Weekly Intelligencer, he had no doubt whatever about the answer. He would have them both.

So Lance, as he walked along the towpath with his hands in his pockets and his head in the air, made the discovery that he was in love; not with one girl or even with two, but with the whole blessed lot.