Jane glances up from her book and signifies a condescending approval, but the sight has a most startling and electrifying effect upon the Poles. They miss, in their enthusiasm, flinging themselves from the carriage window merely by a hair’s breadth, and crying, “Ætna! Ætna!” with passionate satisfaction, not only solemnly clasp hands with one another, but also grasp and shake the limply astonished hands of Jane and Peripatetica. Transpires that the foreigners have been three weeks in Sicily without once having caught a glimpse of the ever present, ever dominant mountain, since, with sulky coquetry, whenever they were within sight it promptly hid in veils of mist, and now they are bound for Cracow, via Palermo, facing uneasily the confession at home of having been to the play and missed seeing the star. They hang from the window in eager endeavour to cram all lost opportunities into one, and rend the heavens with lamentations when the carriage comes to rest immediately opposite a tiny station whose solid minuteness is sufficient to blot from sight all that distant majesty. “It is like life,” the taller foreigner wails, sinking back baffled from an attempt to pierce the obdurate masonry with a yearning eye. “One little ugly emotion close by can shut out from one’s sight all the loftiest beauties of existence!” This fine generalization gathers acuity from the fact that a sharp turn soon after leaving the station piles 183up elevations that quickly rob them of their long-sought opportunity, but for the rest of the time that the paths of the four lie together the Poles insist upon attributing to the direct intervention of Jane and Peripatetica the wiping of this blot from their travelling ’scutcheon—an attitude which Jane and Peripatetica find both soothing and refreshing, and they affect a large familiarity and possessiveness with the Volcano, which the Poles bear with polite and grateful respect; the more so, no doubt, as the two seekers possess—as Americans—a novelty almost more startling and intense than Ætna. The gentlemen from Cracow have never met Americans until now, and make no attempt to disguise the exhilaration of so unwonted a spectacle—confessing that in their turn they too have been speculating upon the racial identity of “the foreign ladies,” whose nationality they were unable to guess. They are consumed with an inexhaustible curiosity to get the “natives’” point of view, and exchange secret glances of surprise and pleasure at the exhibition of human intelligence in a people so remote from Cracow. When the necessary change of train detaches them from their eager investigations Peripatetica is still futilely engaged in her persistent endeavour to combat in the European mind its strange delusion as to the real relations of the sexes in her own land.