we plunged, on leaving the
Grande Chartreuse, while the afternoon sunlight was still golden. The
monastery sank out of our sight as we went, as the moon sinks into the
sea, and was gone for us as if it were on the other side of the world.
Ah, but a sweet, warm world, and I was glad after all that I was not a
monk in carved oak cells and walled gardens, but a free young man who
could vibrate between the South Pole and the Albany.

Molly said that the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse was like a body
without a soul; and in another breath she was asking Jack, quite
seriously, whether she could buy one of the cells from the French
Government, all complete, to "express" as a present to her father in
New York.

We flew, our motor humming like a bee, through exquisite forests
clothing the sides of a narrow ravine, where hidden streams made
music. Then in a twinkling we slipped out from the secret recesses of
scented woods, into a village almost too beautiful to accept as
reality, in a practical mood. There it lay, like a little heap of
pearls tossed down from the lap of one mountain at the feet of
another--and we were at St. Pierre de Chartreuse.

The tiny gem of beauty had caught the glory of Switzerland, and the
soft, fairy charm of Dauphine. Its guardian mountain was a miniature
Matterhorn of indescribable grace and airy stateliness; its lesser
attendants formed a group of peaks, grey and green and rose. As if
enough gifts had not yet been bestowed upon the little place at its
christening, a playground of forest land, rolling up over grassy
slopes, had been given, with a neighbouring river, swift and clear, to
sing it a lullaby.

I had the impulse to clap my hands at St. Pierre de Chartreuse, as at
some "setting" excellently designed and carried out by the most
celebrated of scene painters. It was a place in which to stop a month,
finding a new walk for each new day; but one does not discover walks
in a motor car. One sweeps over the country, sounding notes of
triumph. We glanced at St. Pierre de Chartreuse and sped on towards
Grenoble, through a landscape markedly different from that of Savoie.

In Savoie everything is done lavishly, on a large scale. The eye roams
over spaces of noble amplitude, expressing strength in repose.

Dauphine is livelier and daintier; more lovable, too. Fairies or
brownies (since no mortals do it) keep the whole country like a vast
private park. In crossing from Savoie into Dauphine one