. Peter's, many of whom--the
best-dressed and the worst-behaved--were Americans. It seemed very
homelike and intimate to hear my own language spoken again, even if it
were sometimes sadly mutilated. But I remember St. Peter's that Easter
Sunday chiefly because I had with me a sympathetic companion; one who
knew that St. Peter's was not a place to talk; one who knew enough to
absorb in silence; one, in fact, who understood! Such comprehensive
silence was to my ragged spirit balm and healing.

Beware, oh, beware with whom you travel! One uncongenial person in the
party--one man who sneers at sentiment, one woman whose point of view
is material--can ruin the loveliest journey and dampen one's
heavenliest enthusiasm.

In order to travel properly, one ought to be in vein. It is as bad to
begin a journey with a companion who gets on one's nerves as it is to
sit down to a banquet and quarrel through the courses. The effect is
the same. One can digest neither. People seem to select travelling
companions as recklessly as they marry. They generally manage to start
with the wrong one. I often shudder to hear two women at a luncheon
say, "Why not arrange to go to Europe together next year?" And yet I
solace myself with the thought, "Why not? If you considered! your list
of friends for a month, and selected the most desirable, you would
probably make even a worse mistake, for travelling develops hatred
more than any other one thing I know of; so, in addition to spoiling
your journey, you would also lose your friend--or wish you _could_
lose her!"

George Eliot has said that there was no greater strain on friendship
than a dissimilarity of taste in jests. But I am inclined to believe
George Eliot never travelled extensively, else, without disturbing
that statement, she would have added, "or a dissimilarity in point of
view with one's travelling companion."

It makes no difference which one's view is the loftier. It is the
dissimilarity which rasps and grates. Doubtless the material is as
much irritated by the spiritual as the poetic is fretted by the
prosaic. It is worse than to be at a Wagner matinee with a woman who
cares only for Verdi. One wishes to nudge her arm and feel a
sympathetic pressure which means, "Yes, yes, so do I!" It is awful not
to be able to nudge! Speech is seldom imperative, but understanding
signals is as necessary to one's soul-happiness as air to the lungs.
So Greece with one who has but a Baedeker knowl