I think this is the least pleasant letter I have ever sent you:  shall I tell you why?  It was not the sermon:  he is quite a forgivable good man in his way.  But in the afternoon that same Mrs. P——­ came, got me in a corner, and wanted to unburden herself of invective against your mother, believing that I should be glad, because her coldness to me has become known!  What mean things some people can think about one!  I heard nothing:  but I am ruffled in all my plumage and want stroking.  And my love to your mother, please, if she will have it.  It is only through her that I get you.—­Ever your very own.

LETTER XXVIII.

Dearest:  Here comes a letter to you from me flying in the opposite direction.  I won’t say I am not wishing to go; but oh, to be a bird in two places at once!  Give this letter, then, a special nesting-place, because I am so much on the wing elsewhere.

I shut my eyes most of the time through France, and opened them on a soup-tureen full of coffee which presented itself at the frontier:  and then realized that only a little way ahead lay Berne, with baths, buns, bears, breakfast, and other nice things beginning with B, waiting to make us clean, comfortable, contented, and other nice things beginning with C.

Through France I loved you sleepy fashion, with many dreams in between not all about you.  But now I am breathing thoughts of you out of a new atmosphere—­a great gulp of you, all clean-living and high-thinking between these Alpine royal highnesses with snow-white crowns to their heads:  and no time for a word more about anything except you:  you, and double-you,—­and treble-you if the alphabet only had grace to contain so beautiful a symbol!  Good-by:  we meet next, perhaps, out of Lucerne:  if not,—­Italy.

What a lot I have to go through before we meet again visibly!  You will find me world-worn, my Beloved!  Write often.

LETTER XXIX.

Beloved:  You know of the method for making a cat settle down in a strange place by buttering her all over:  the theory being that by the time she has polished off the butter she feels herself at home?  My morning’s work has been the buttering of the Mother-Aunt with such things as will Lucerne her the most.  When her instincts are appeased I am the more free to indulge my own.

So after breakfast we went round the cloisters, very thick set with tablets and family vaults, and crowded graves inclosed.  It proved quite “the best butter.”  To me the penance turned out interesting after a period of natural repulsion.  A most unpleasant addition to sepulchral sentiment is here the fashion:  photographs of the departed set into the stone.  You see an elegant and genteel marble cross:  there on the pedestal above the name is the photo:—­a smug man with bourgeois whiskers,—­a militiaman with waxed mustaches well turned up,—­a woman well attired and conscious of it:  you cannot think how indecent looked the pretension of such types to the dignity of death and immortality.