lf the cities of Europe before I have done
with her. I always lose my maids. They are so much more passive and
forgettable than luggage--abroad that is. And Justin usually in the old
days used to remember about them. And his valet used to see after
them,--a most attentive man. Justin cannot, he says, have his wife
abroad with merely a companion; people would talk; maid it must be as
well. And so in a week or less I shall start, unusually tailor-made, for
South Germany and all that jolly country, companioned and maided. I
shall tramp--on the feet God has given me--in stout boots. Miss
Summersley Satchel marches, I understand, like the British infantry but
on a vegetarian 'basis,'--fancy calling your nourishment a 'basis'!--the
maid and so forth by _Eilgut_...."

Sec. 7

After the letter containing that announcement she wrote to me twice
again, once from Oban and then after a long interval from Siena. The
former was a scornfully minute description of the English at their
holidays and how the conversation went among the women after dinner.
"They are like a row of Japanese lanterns, all blown out long ago and
swinging about in a wind," she wrote--an extravagant image that yet
conveys something of the large, empty, unilluminating effect of a sort
of social intercourse very vividly. In the second letter she was
concerned chiefly with the natural beauty of Italy and how latterly she
had thrice wept at beautiful things, and what this mystery of beauty
could be that had such power over her emotions.

"All up the hillside before the window as I write the herbage is thick
with anemones. They aren't scattered evenly and anyhow amongst the other
things but in little clusters and groups that die away and begin again,
like the repetitions of an air in some musical composition. I have been
sitting and looking at them for the better part of an hour, loving them
more and then more, and the sweet sunlight that is on them and in among
them.... How marvellous are these things, Stephen! All these little
exquisite things that are so abundant in the world, the gleaming lights
and blossoms, the drifting scents! At times these things bring me to
weeping.... I can't help it. It is as if God who is so stern and high,
so terrible to all our appeals, took pity for a moment and saw fit to
speak very softly and tenderly...."

That was the last letter I was ever to have from her.

CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH

THE LAST MEETING

Sec. 1

In