Though the road was poor, except in bits, and gave us all the bumps mentioned in Sir Ralph's rules, the country was lovely and loveable. Grapes, mulberries, rice, and stuff called maize, which looked exactly like our American corn, grew together like a happy family of sisters, and from the hills dotted about, more thickly than Mamma's crowns on her toilet things, looked down old feudal castles as melancholy as the cypresses that stood beside them, like the sole friends of their adversity. Of Tortona and Voghera I carried away only the ghost of an impression, for we darted through their long main streets, deserted in the noon-tide hour, and darted out again onto the straight white ribbon of road that was leading us across all Northern Italy. It was so dusty that Mamma, Maida, and I put on the motor-veils we had discarded after the first few hours of the trip till now; things made of pongee silk, with windows of talc over our eyes and little lace doors for our breath to pass through. It was fun when we would slacken speed in some town or village, to see how the young Italians tried to pry into the motor-masks' secrets and find out if we were pretty. How much more they would have stared at Maida than at her two grey-clad companions, if they had known! But behind the pongee and the talc, for once our features could flaunt themselves on an equality with hers. Even monks, brown of face and robe, gliding noiselessly through wide market places in the blue shadows of hoary campaniles, searched those talc windows of ours with a curiosity that was pathetic. Young officers, with great dark eyes and slender figures tightly buttoned-up in grey-blue uniforms, visibly preened themselves as the car with the three veiled ladies would sweep round a corner; and really I think there must be something rather alluring about a passing glance from a pair of eyes in a face that will always remain a mystery. If I were a man I believe I should find it so. Anyway, it's fun for a girl to guess how she would feel about things if she were a man. I suppose though, we 're generally wrong.