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.
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