"Oh, then you regarded your visit as largely educational?" Bernard put in, with increasing interest. Though he's a fellow and tutor of King's, I will readily admit that Bernard's personal tastes lie rather in the direction of rowing and foot-ball than of general culture; but still, the American girl's point of view decidedly attracted him by its novelty in a woman. "That's so, sir," Melissa answered once more, in her accustomed affirmative. "I took it as a sort of university trip. I graduated in Europe. In America, of course, wherever you go, all you can see's everywhere just the same--purely new and American; the language, the manners, the type, don't vary. In Europe, you cross a frontier or a ribbon of sea, and everything's different. Now, on this trip of ours, we went first to Chester to glimpse a typical old English town--those rows, oh, how lovely! And then to Leamington for Warwick Castle and Kenilworth. Kenilworth's just glorious--isn't it?--with its mouldering red walls and its dark-green ivy, and the ghost of Amy Robsart walking up and down upon the close-shaven English grass-plots." "I've heard it's very beautiful," Bernard admitted, gravely. "What! you live so close, and you've never BEEN there!" Melissa exclaimed, in frank surprise. Bernard allowed with a smile he had been so culpably negligent. "And Stratford-on-Avon, too!" Melissa went on, enthusiastically, her black eyes beaming. "Isn't Stratford just charming! I don't care for the interminable Shakespeare nuisance, you know; that's all too new and made up; we could raise a Shakespeare house like that in Kansas City any day. But the church and the elms and the swans and the river! I made such a sweet little sketch of them all, so soft and peaceful. At least, the place itself was as sweet as a corner of heaven, and I tried as well as I could in my way to sketch it." "I suppose it IS very pretty," Bernard replied, in a meditative tone. Melissa started visibly. "What! have you never been there, either?" she exclaimed, taken aback. "Well, that IS odd, now! You live in England, and have never run over to Stratford-on-Avon! Why, you do surprise me! But there! I suppose you English live in the midst of culture, as it were, and can get to it all right away at any time; so perhaps you don't think quite as much of it as we, who have to save up our money, perhaps for years, to get, for once in our lives, just a single passing glimpse of it. You live at Cambridge, you see; you must be steeped in culture right down to the finger-ends." Bernard modestly responded, twirling his manly moustache, that the river and the running-ground, he feared, were more in his way than art or architecture. "And where else did you go besides England?" Lucy asked, really interested.