There were thousands of people in St. Peter’s, many of whom—­the best-dressed and the worst-behaved—­were Americans.  It seemed very homelike and intimate to hear my own language spoken again, even if it were sometimes sadly mutilated.  But I remember St. Peter’s that Easter Sunday chiefly because I had with me a sympathetic companion; one who knew that St. Peter’s was not a place to talk; one who knew enough to absorb in silence; one, in fact, who understood!  Such comprehensive silence was to my ragged spirit balm and healing.

Beware, oh, beware with whom you travel!  One uncongenial person in the party—­one man who sneers at sentiment, one woman whose point of view is material—­can ruin the loveliest journey and dampen one’s heavenliest enthusiasm.

In order to travel properly, one ought to be in vein.  It is as bad to begin a journey with a companion who gets on one’s nerves as it is to sit down to a banquet and quarrel through the courses.  The effect is the same.  One can digest neither.  People seem to select travelling companions as recklessly as they marry.  They generally manage to start with the wrong one.  I often shudder to hear two women at a luncheon say, “Why not arrange to go to Europe together next year?” And yet I solace myself with the thought, “Why not?  If you considered! your list of friends for a month, and selected the most desirable, you would probably make even a worse mistake, for travelling develops hatred more than any other one thing I know of; so, in addition to spoiling your journey, you would also lose your friend—­or wish you could lose her!”

George Eliot has said that there was no greater strain on friendship than a dissimilarity of taste in jests.  But I am inclined to believe George Eliot never travelled extensively, else, without disturbing that statement, she would have added, “or a dissimilarity in point of view with one’s travelling companion.”

It makes no difference which one’s view is the loftier.  It is the dissimilarity which rasps and grates.  Doubtless the material is as much irritated by the spiritual as the poetic is fretted by the prosaic.  It is worse than to be at a Wagner matinee with a woman who cares only for Verdi.  One wishes to nudge her arm and feel a sympathetic pressure which means, “Yes, yes, so do I!” It is awful not to be able to nudge!  Speech is seldom imperative, but understanding signals is as necessary to one’s soul-happiness as air to the lungs.  So Greece with one who has but a Baedeker knowledge of art, or Rome to one who remembers her history vaguely as something that she “took” at school, is simply maddening to one who forgets the technicalities of dates and formulas, and rapturously breathes it in, scarcely knowing whence came the love or knowledge of it, but realizing that one has at last come into one’s kingdom.

I was singularly fortunate from time to time in discovering these kindred, sympathetic spirits.  I met one party of three in Egypt, and found them again in Greece, and crossed to Italy with them.  It was a mother and son and a lovely girl.  They will never know, unless they happen across this page, how much they were to me on the Adriatic, and what a void they filled in Athens.