"Yes, we came over again in February, and have been here in Venice since the last of March. For some reasons I was sorry to come back--one _is_ so much more comfortable at home! What I have suffered in these wretchedly cold houses over here words, Mr. Blake, can never express. For in England, you know, they consider fifty-eight Fahrenheit quite warm enough for their drawing-rooms, while here in Italy--well, one never _is_ so cold, I think, as in a warm climate. Yes, we should have been more comfortable, as far as _that_ goes, in my own house in New York, reading all those delightful books on Art in a properly warmed atmosphere (and I must say a properly warmed spirit too), and looking at photographs of the pictures (you can have them as large as you like, you know), instead of freezing our feet over the originals, which half the time the eyes of a lynx could not see. But it is not always winter, of course. And then I have lived over here so long that I have, it seems, acquired foreign ways that are very unpopular at home. You may smile, and it _is_ too ridiculous; but it is so. For instance, last summer we went to Carley Ledge (you know Carley; pretty little place), and we found out afterwards that the people came near mobbing us! Not exactly that, of course, but they took the most violent dislike to us; and why? It is too comical. Because we had innocently treated Carley as we treat a pretty village over here. One lady said, and, I am told, with indignation, that we had been stopping, 'more than once, right in the main street, and standing there, in that _public_ place, to look at a cloud passing over the mountain!' And another reported that she had herself discovered us 'sitting on the _grass_, no farther away from the main street than the open space in front of Deacon Seymour's, just as though it was out in the country!' That 'out in the country' is rather good, isn't it? Always that poor little main street!" "Still, I think, on the whole, that the cold houses are worse than the village comments," replied Mrs. Marcy's visitor. "A New-Yorker I know, a confirmed European too, always goes home to spend the three months of winter. When he comes back in the spring his English friends say, 'I hear you have had so many degrees of frost over there--fancy!'--meaning, perhaps, zero or under. To which he assents, but always inflexibly goes back. They look upon him as a kind of Esquimau. But how does Miss Marcy like exile?" "Oh, Claudia is very fond of Italy. You have not seen her, by-the-way, since she was a child, and she is now twenty. Do you find her altered?" "Greatly." "At home she was never thought pretty--when she was younger, I mean. She was thought too--too--vigorous is perhaps the best word; she had not that graceful slenderness one expects to see in a young girl. But over here, I notice, the opinion seems to be different," continued the lady, half questioningly. "And, of course, too, she has improved."