"We'll go wherever you please--you make every place the one place," he
said, as if he were humouring an irresistible child.

"To Switzerland, then? Celeste says St. Moritz is too heavenly,"
exclaimed Undine, who gathered her ideas of Europe chiefly from the
conversation of her experienced attendant.

"One can be cool short of the Engadine. Why not go south again--say to
Capri?"

"Capri? Is that the island we saw from Naples, where the artists go?"
She drew her brows together. "It would be simply awful getting there in
this heat."

"Well, then, I know a little place in Switzerland where one can still
get away from the crowd, and we can sit and look at a green water-fall
while I lie in wait for adjectives."

Mr. Spragg's astonishment on learning that his son-in-law contemplated
maintaining a household on the earnings of his Muse was still matter for
pleasantry between the pair; and one of the humours of their first weeks
together had consisted in picturing themselves as a primeval couple
setting forth across a virgin continent and subsisting on the adjectives
which Ralph was to trap for his epic. On this occasion, however, his
wife did not take up the joke, and he remained silent while their
carriage climbed the long dusty hill to the Fontebranda gate. He had
seen her face droop as he suggested the possibility of an escape from
the crowds in Switzerland, and it came to him, with the sharpness of a
knife-thrust, that a crowd was what she wanted--that she was sick to
death of being alone with him.