‘Who knows that your Shakespeare did not get a sound drubbing from Sir Thomas Lucy’s gamekeepers, before he was stung into retaliating by that exquisitely refined lampoon which tradition ascribes to him? You worship your Swan of Avon for what he wrote, not for what he did. Can you not deal the same measure to Voltaire?’ ‘I don’t know anything of his writing, except a few speeches out of “Zaïre,” and an epitome of his “Louis Quatorze.” If you are going to put him on an equality with Shakespeare——’ ‘I am not. But I say that as an all-round literary worker he never had an equal, unless it were Scott, who has surpassed him in many things, and who could, I believe, have equalled him on any ground.’ ‘Scott was an old dear,’ answered Daphne, with her usual flippancy, ‘and I would rather have “Kenilworth” and “The Bride of Lammermoor” than all this Voltaire of yours ever wrote.’ ‘And which you, most conscientious of critics, never read.’ ‘Well, Daphne, what do you think of the country?’ asked Madoline, now that they had left the city and were driving slowly up hill through a pastoral district. ‘Is it not pretty?’ ‘Pretty,’ cried Daphne, ‘of course it is pretty; but it isn’t Swiss. What do I care for prettiness? There is enough of that and to spare in Warwickshire. Why,’ with ineffable disgust, ‘the country is absolutely green!’ ‘What colour did you expect it to be?’ asked Edgar, smiling at her energetic displeasure. ‘White, of course! One dazzling sweep of snow. One blinding world of whiteness.’ ‘If you want that kind of thing you had better go to the North Pole,’ said Gerald. ‘Not I. If this is Switzerland I have done with travelling. I daresay the North Pole is as tame as Stratford High Street.’ ‘Does not that grand Jura range frowning yonder content you?’ asked Gerald. ‘Is not your eye satisfied by the cloud-wrapped Alps on the other side of that blue lake?’ ‘No; they are too far off. I want to be among them—a part of them. After a hypocritical waiter telling me last night that Mont Blanc was _là, tout près_, a truthful chambermaid confessed this morning that it is fourteen hours’ drive to Chamounix, and then one is only at the foot of the mountain. As for this landscape we are now travelling through——’ ‘It is uncommonly like Jersey,’ said Edgar. ‘I took my mother there for her holiday five summers ago. It is a capital place for boating and rambling about, and crossing over to the other islands: but the mater didn’t like it. The people weren’t genteel enough for her. The gowns and bonnets weren’t up to her mark.’ They were at Ferney by this time, a rustic village with one or two humble cafés, a few small shops, a farm-yard. Here Daphne descried a pair of oxen drawing a waggon of hay—noble beasts, dappled and tawny—and the sight of these gave a foreign air to the scene which in some wise lessened her disgust.