melody. "It is
all as you say purely impersonal and poetic. My mother is an
Englishwoman, but she sings 'Dumfounder'd the English saw, they saw,'
with the greatest fire and fury."

XIII

"I think I was never so completely under the spell of a country as I
am of Scotland." I made this acknowledgment freely, but I knew that it
would provoke comment from my compatriots.

"Oh yes, my dear, you have been just as spellbound before, only you
don't remember it," replied Salemina promptly. "I have never seen a
person more perilously appreciative or receptive than you."

"'Perilously' is just the word," chimed in Francesca delightedly;
"when you care for a place you grow porous, as it were, until after a
time you are precisely like blotting-paper. Now, there was Italy, for
example. After eight weeks in Venice you were completely Venetian,
from your fan to the ridiculous little crepe shawl you wore because an
Italian prince had told you that centuries were usually needed to
teach a woman how to wear a shawl, but that you had been born with the
art, and the shoulders! Anything but a watery street was repulsive to
you. Cobblestones? 'Ordinario, duro, brutto! A gondola? Ah,
bellissima! Let me float forever thus!' You bathed your spirit in
sunshine and color; I can hear you murmur now, 'O Venezia benedetta!
non ti voglio lasciar!'"

"It was just the same when she spent a month in France with the
Baroness de Hautenoblesse," continued Salemina. "When she returned to
America it is no flattery to say that in dress, attitude, inflection,
manner, she was a thorough Parisienne. There was an elegant
superficiality and a superficial elegance about her that I can never
forget, nor yet her extraordinary volubility in a foreign
language,--the fluency with which she expressed her inmost soul on all
topics without the aid of a single irregular verb, for these she was
never able to acquire; oh, it was wonderful, but there was no
affectation about it; she had simply been a kind of blotting-paper, as
Miss Monroe says, and France had written itself all over her."

"I don't wish to interfere with anybody's diagnosis," I interposed at
the first possible moment, "but perhaps after you've both finished
your psychologic investigation the subject may be allowed to explain
herself from the inside, so to speak. I won't deny the spell of Italy,
but I think the spell that Scotland casts over one is quite a
different thing, more spiritual, more di