t they might not be torn up by the roots.

It was, of course, poor dear Florence who wanted to go to Las Tours.
You are to imagine that, however much her bright personality came from
Stamford, Connecticut, she was yet a graduate of Poughkeepsie. I never
could imagine how she did it--the queer, chattery person that she was.
With the far-away look in her eyes--which wasn't, however, in the least
romantic--I mean that she didn't look as if she were seeing poetic
dreams, or looking through you, for she hardly ever did look at
you!--holding up one hand as if she wished to silence any objection--or
any comment for the matter of that--she would talk. She would talk about
William the Silent, about Gustave the Loquacious, about Paris frocks,
about how the poor dressed in 1337, about Fantin-Latour, about the
Paris-Lyons-Mediterranee train-deluxe, about whether it would be
worth while to get off at Tarascon and go across the windswept
suspension-bridge, over the Rhone to take another look at Beaucaire.

We never did take another look at Beaucaire, of course--beautiful
Beaucaire, with the high, triangular white tower, that looked as thin
as a needle and as tall as the Flatiron, between Fifth and
Broadway--Beaucaire with the grey walls on the top of the pinnacle
surrounding an acre and a half of blue irises, beneath the tallness of
the stone pines, What a beautiful thing the stone pine is!...

No, we never did go back anywhere. Not to Heidelberg, not to Hamelin,
not to Verona, not to Mont Majour--not so much as to Carcassonne itself.
We talked of it, of course, but I guess Florence got all she wanted out
of one look at a place. She had the seeing eye.

I haven't, unfortunately, so that the world is full of places to which I
want to return--towns with the blinding white sun upon them; stone pines
against the blue of the sky; corners of gables, all carved and painted
with stags and scarlet flowers and crowstepped gables with the little
saint at the top; and grey and pink palazzi and walled towns a mile or
so back from the sea, on the Mediterranean, between Leghorn and Naples.
Not one of them did we see more than once, so that the whole world for
me is like spots of colour in an immense canvas. Perhaps if it weren't
so I should have something to catch hold of now.

Is all this digression or isn't it digression? Again I don't know. You,
the listener, sit opposite me. But you are so silent. You don't tell me
anything. I am, at any ra