Towards the end of the summer, during the height of which Mrs. Lennox’s party had returned to the Italian lakes, one of the friends she made at Cadenabbia represented to that good woman that her rheumatism, from which she had suffered during the winter, though perhaps not quite so severely as she imagined, made it absolutely necessary to go through a “cure” at Aix-les-Bains, where, as everybody knows, rheumatism is miraculously operated upon by the waters. Aunt Sophy was very much excited by this piece of advice. In the company which she had been frequenting of late, at the _tables d’hôte_ and in the public promenades, she had begun to perceive that it was scarcely respectable for a person of a certain age not to go through a yearly “cure” at some one or other of a number of watering-places. It indicated a state of undignified health and robustness which was not quite nice for a lady no longer young. There were many who went to Germany, to the different _bads_ there, and a considerable number whose “cure” was in France, and some even who sought unknown springs in Switzerland and Italy; but, taken on the whole, very few indeed were the persons over fifty of either sex who did not reckon a “cure” occupying three weeks or so of the summer or autumn as a necessary part of the routine of life. To all Continental people it was indispensable, and there were many Americans who crossed the ocean for this purpose, going to Carlsbad or to Kissingen or somewhere else with as much regularity as if they had lived within a railway journey of the place. Only the English were careless on so important a subject, but even among them many become convinced of the necessity day by day.