38At Amalfi they plunged once again into the noisy tourist belt—the va et vient, the chatter, the screaming flutter of the passenger pigeons of the Italian spring. And yet there was peace in the tiny white cells in which they hung over the sheer steep, while the light died nacreously along the West. There was quiet in certain tiny hidden courts and terraces under the icy moonlight, and Jane said in one of these—her utterance somewhat interrupted by the chattering of her teeth, for Italian spring nights are as cold as Italian spring days are warm—Jane said: “What idiotic assertions are made in our time about ancient Europe having no love for, no eye for, Nature’s beauty! Did you ever come across a mediæval monastery, a Greek or Roman temple that was not placed with an unerring perception of just the one point at which it would look best, just at the one point at which everything would look best from it?” “Of course I never did,” Peripatetica admitted with sympathetic conviction. “We get that absurd impression of their indifference from the fact that our forebears were not nearly so fond of talking about their emotions as we. They had a trust in their fellow man’s comprehension that we have lost. We always imagine that no one can know things unless we tell them, and tell them with all our t’s carefully crossed and our i’s elaborately dotted. The old literatures are always illustrating that same confidence in other people’s imaginations, stating facts with what to our modern diffuseness appears the baldest simplicity, and yet somehow conveying all their subtlest meanings. Our ancestors happily were not ‘inebriated with the exuberance of their own verbosity.’... And now, Jane, 39bring that congealed nose of yours in out of the open air. The moon isn’t going on a vacation. She will be doing her old romance and beauty business at the same old stand long after we are dead and buried, not to mention to-morrow night.”