"Pavia, Pavia--and all the open space in front of it is drenched in April with that divinest smell. And I know about the little red monthly roses scrambling in and out of the Campo Santo above Genoa in January--in January! Red roses in January. While here.... And I know about the fireflies in the gardens round Florence--that's May, early May, while here we still sit up against the stoves. And I know about the chestnut woods, real chestnuts that you eat afterwards, along the steep sides of the lakes, miles and miles of them, with deep green moss underneath, and I know about the queer black grapes that sting your tongue and fill the world with a smell of strawberries in September, and what the Appian way looks like in April when it is still waving flowery grass burning in an immensity of light, and I know the honey-colour of the houses in the old parts of Rome, and that the irises they sell there in the streets are like pale pink coral--and all one needs to do to see these things for oneself is to catch a train at Meuk. _Any_ day one could catch that train at Meuk. Every day it starts and one is never there. And Kökensee would roll back like a curtain, and the world be changed like a garment, like an old stiff clayey garment, like an old shroud, into all _that_. Think of it! What a background, what a background for the painting of the greatest picture in the world!" She stopped and took up the paddle again. "I wonder," she said, with sudden listlessness "why I say all this to you?" "Because," said Ingram, in a low voice, "you're my sister and my mate." She dipped the paddle into the water and turned the punt towards home. "Oh, well," she said, the enthusiasm gone out of her. The water and the sky and the forests along the banks and the spire of the Kökensee church at the end of the lake looked dark and sad going this way. At first she could see nothing after the blinding light of the other direction, then everything cleared into dun colour and bleakness. "How one talks," she said. "I say things--enthusiastic things, and you say things--beautiful kind things, and it's all no good." "Isn't it? Not only do we say them but we're going to do them. You're coming with me to Venice, my dear. Haven't you read in those travel books of yours what the lagoons look like at sunset?" She made an impatient movement. "Ingeborg, let us reason together." "I can't reason." "Well, listen to me then doing it by myself." And he proceeded to do it. All the way down the lake he did it, and up along the path through the rye, and afterwards in the garden pacing up and down in the gathering twilight beneath the lime-trees he did it. "Wonderful," he thought in that submerged portion of the back of his mind where imps of criticism sat and scoffed, "the trouble one takes at the beginning over a woman."