“To Switzerland, then?  Celeste says St. Moritz is too heavenly,” exclaimed Undine, who gathered her ideas of Europe chiefly from the conversation of her experienced attendant.

“One can be cool short of the Engadine.  Why not go south again—­say to Capri?”

“Capri?  Is that the island we saw from Naples, where the artists go?” She drew her brows together.  “It would be simply awful getting there in this heat.”

“Well, then, I know a little place in Switzerland where one can still get away from the crowd, and we can sit and look at a green water-fall while I lie in wait for adjectives.”

Mr. Spragg’s astonishment on learning that his son-in-law contemplated maintaining a household on the earnings of his Muse was still matter for pleasantry between the pair; and one of the humours of their first weeks together had consisted in picturing themselves as a primeval couple setting forth across a virgin continent and subsisting on the adjectives which Ralph was to trap for his epic.  On this occasion, however, his wife did not take up the joke, and he remained silent while their carriage climbed the long dusty hill to the Fontebranda gate.  He had seen her face droop as he suggested the possibility of an escape from the crowds in Switzerland, and it came to him, with the sharpness of a knife-thrust, that a crowd was what she wanted—­that she was sick to death of being alone with him.

He sat motionless, staring ahead at the red-brown walls and towers on the steep above them.  After all there was nothing sudden in his discovery.  For weeks it had hung on the edge of consciousness, but he had turned from it with the heart’s instinctive clinging to the unrealities by which it lives.  Even now a hundred qualifying reasons rushed to his aid.  They told him it was not of himself that Undine had wearied, but only of their present way of life.  He had said a moment before, without conscious exaggeration, that her presence made any place the one place; yet how willingly would he have consented to share in such a life as she was leading before their marriage?  And he had to acknowledge their months of desultory wandering from one remote Italian hill-top to another must have seemed as purposeless to her as balls and dinners would have been to him.  An imagination like his, peopled with such varied images and associations, fed by so many currents from the long stream of human experience, could hardly picture the bareness of the small half-lit place in which his wife’s spirit fluttered.  Her mind was as destitute of beauty and mystery as the prairie school-house in which she had been educated; and her ideals seemed to Ralph as pathetic as the ornaments made of corks and cigar-bands with which her infant hands had been taught to adorn it.  He was beginning to understand this, and learning to adapt himself to the narrow compass of her experience.  The task of opening new windows in her mind was inspiring enough to give him infinite patience; and he would not yet own to himself that her pliancy and variety were imitative rather than spontaneous.