’That will depend.  I am not particularly fond of London.  A very little of your English Babylon satisfies me, in a general way; but there are conditions which might make England enchanting.  Where do you go at the end of the season?’

’First to Goodwood, and then to Cowes.  Mr. Smithson is so kind as to place his yacht at Lady Kirkbank’s disposal, and I am to be her guest on board the Cayman, just as I am in Arlington Street.’

’The Cayman!  That name is a reminiscence of Mr. Smithson’s South American travels.’

‘No doubt!  Was he long in South America?’

‘Three or four years.’

‘But not in Cuba all that time, I suppose?’

’He had business relations with Cuba all that time, and oscillated between our island and the main.  He was rather fortunate in his little adventures with us—­made almost as much money as General Tacon, of blessed memory.  But I dare say Smithson has told you all his adventures in that part of the world.’

’No, he very rarely talks about his travels:  and I am not particularly interested in commercial speculations.  There is always so much to think of and talk about in the business of the moment.  Are you fond of Cuba?’

’Not passionately.  I always feel as if I were an exile there, and yet one of my ancestors was with Columbus when be discovered the island, and my race were among the earliest settlers.  My family has given three Captain-generals to Cuba:  but I cannot forget that I belong to an older world, and have forfeited that which ought to have been a brilliant place in Europe for the luxurious obscurity of a colony.’

’But you must be attached to a place in which your family have lived for so many generations?’

’I like the stars and the sea, the mountains and savannas, the tropical vegetation, and the dreamy, half-oriental life; but at best it is a kind of stagnation, and after a residence of a few months in the island of my birth I generally spread my wings for the wider world of the old continent or the new.’

‘You must have travelled so much,’ said Lesbia, with a sigh.  ’I have been nowhere and seen nothing.  I feel like a child who has been shut up in a nursery all its life, and knows of no world beyond four walls.’

‘Not to travel is not to live,’ said Don Gomez.

‘I am to be in Italy next November, I believe,’ said Lesbia, not caring to own that this Italian trip was to be her honeymoon.

‘Italy!’ exclaimed the Spaniard, contemptuously.  ’Once the finishing school of the English nobility; now the happy hunting-ground of the Cockney tourist and the prosperous Yankee.  All the poetry of Italy has been dried up, and the whole country vulgarised.  If you want romance in the old world go to Spain; in the new, try Peru or Brazil, Mexico or California.’

‘I am afraid I am not adventurous enough to go so far.’

‘No:  women cling to beaten tracks.’