Bellew and Justin picked up their acquaintance where they had dropped it eighteen months before, and agreed better than ever, enjoying, not so much each other, as their common interest in a common hobby. Bellew even talked tentatively of the voyage he intended to make up the coast, and on to the Hebrides to take photographs of sea-birds and their nests for his new book. He needed an active assistant. But Justin, tempted, was non-committal. He was only just home. His mother did not grow younger. He was too fond of her even to tell her of the idea lest she should insist, yet, with time heavy on his hands, it made him restless, the readier for a change when she, coughing a little and looking, in spite of her comfortable house and the furs from Russia, a frail, nipped leaf of a woman, talked of the Riviera—or Italy? She had not been to Italy since her honeymoon, and Justin, for all his globe-trotting, had not been at all. What about Italy? Italy would be delightful if Justin wouldn’t find it dull, with just the two of them? It was then that Justin said—I am always glad that it was Justin who said— “Well, what about Laura?” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XI Well, what about Laura? Will you take a peep at Laura in bed with the remains of a cold, on her chill March birthday—Laura, very sorry for herself, languidly undoing her presents—miraculously cured by the arrival of The Letter? You and I, of course, can sympathize—would dearly love a trip to Italy with the right people. But there we pause. But be eighteen: be soaked to your crude soul in art, and the literature and the history and the legend of art, till Colour is your romance and Line your religion, and gradually, inevitably, Italy, that tenth muse, grows in your mind as love grows, from a mere word to an idea, from an idea to a symbol, from a symbol to a real presence that will not be denied, that calls to you as the Holy Places called to the Crusaders long ago. And if into the bargain you have been homesick—— Be eighteen and homesick—it is worth your while—before you go to Italy with Justin and Mrs. Cloud! Italy and Justin—Justin and Italy! It was beyond belief. One delight, indeed, so far neutralized the other, that she did at last attain a state of calm, ‘French calm,’ in which she wound up her affairs, packed her trunk—she would not travel for a week, but she packed her trunk that day—and, interviewing the Demoiselles Dunois, broke the miraculous news. It was almost inevitable, while Life, like Monna Lisa, wears her little crooked smile, that Laura should have overwhelmed those enthusiasts at the instant of their assembly to do the like by her. But in the joyous hubbub of keys and speeds and gesture, their voices, as the elder, soon rose predominant, and Laura must listen while they detailed, amid appeals to Monsieur La Motte, benevolent in the seat of honour, their good-fairy plans.