re not
impressionable, and are therefore honest in denying the feeling; or
they think it vulgar to admit it; or I am the only grown person in
America who never has been to Europe before.

But I am indifferent to their opinion. People are right in saying this
great tremendous rush of feeling can come but once. It is like being
in love for the first time. You like it and yet you don't like it. You
wish it would go away, yet you fear that it will go all too soon. It
gets into your head and makes you dizzy, and you want to shut your
eyes, but you are afraid if you do that you will miss something. You
cannot eat and you cannot sleep, and you feel that you have two
consciousnesses: one which belongs to the life you have lived
hitherto, and which still is going on, somewhere in the world,
unmindful of you, and you unmindful of it; and the other is this new
bliss which is beating in your veins and sounding in your ears and
shining before your eyes, which no one knows and no one dreams of, but
which keeps a smile on your lips--a smile which has in it nothing of
humor, nothing from the great without, but which-comes from the secret
recesses of your own inner consciousness, where the heart of the
matter lies.

I remember nothing definite about that first drive. I, for my part,
saw with unseeing eyes. My sister had seen it all before, so she had
the power of speech. Occasionally she prodded me and cried, "Look, oh!
look quickly." But I never swerved. "I can't look. If I do I shall
miss something. You attend to your own window and I'll attend to mine.
Coming back I will see your side."

When we got beyond the shops I said to the cabman:

"Do you know exactly the way you have come?"

"Yes, miss," he said.

"Then go back precisely the same way."

"Have you lost something, miss?" he inquired.

"Yes," I said, "I have lost an impression, and I must look till I find
it."

"Very good, miss," he said.

If I had said, "I have carelessly let fall my cathedral," or, "I have
lost my orang-outang. Look for him!" an imperturbable British cabby
would only touch his cap and say, "Very good, miss!"

So we followed our own trail back to "The Insular." "In this way," I
said to my sister, "we both get a complete view. To-morrow we will do
it all over again."

But we found that we could not wait for the morrow. We did it all over
again that afternoon, and that second time I was able in a measure to
detach myself from the hum and buzz an