ging; but he
won't go there. He says it is a _seccatura_. Everything is a
_seccatura_. He only likes places where he can meet all the world.
"Paris will be a solitude too, never fear," he said, very petulantly;
"for there will be all the _petits theatres_, and the open-air concerts,
and we can dine in the Bois and down the river, and we can run to
Trouville. It will be better than rain, rain, rain, and nothing to look
at except your amiable aunt's big horses and big trees. I adore horses,
and trees are not bad if they are planted away from the house, but,
viewed as eternal companions, one may have too much of them." And I am
his eternal companion; but it seems already I don't count! I have not
said anything. I know one oughtn't. But Piero saw how it vexed me, and
it made him cross. "_Cara mia_," he said, "why did you not tell me
before we married that you intended me to be buried forever in a box
under wet leaves, like a rose that is being sent to the market? I should
have known what to expect; and I do not like wet leaves." I could not
help reminding him that he had been ever, ever so anxious to come to
Coombe. Then he laughed; but he was very cross, too. "Could I tell,
_anima mia_," he cried, "that Coombe was situated in a succession of
lagoons, contains not one single French novel, is fifteen miles asunder
from its own railway-station, and is blessed with a population of
day-laborers? What man have I seen since I have been here, except your
parish priest, who mumbles, wears spectacles, and tries to give me a
tract against the Holy Father? In this country you do not know what it
is to be warm. You do not know what sunshine is like. You take an
umbrella when you go in the garden. You put on a water-proof to go and
hear one little, shivering nightingale sing in a wet elder-bush. I tell
you I am tired of your country, absolutely tired. You are an angel; no
doubt you are an angel; but you cannot console me for the intolerable
emptiness of this intolerable life, where there is nothing on earth to
do but to eat, drink, and sleep, and drive in a dog-cart." All this he
said in one breath, in a flash of forked lightning, as it were. Now that
I write it down, it does not seem so very dreadful; but as he, with the
most fiery scorn, the most contemptuous passion, said it, I assure you
it was terrible. It revealed, just as the flash of lightning would show
a gravel-pit, how fearfully bored he has been all the time I thought he
was