“If I had been really and truly drowned I think it would have been a pity!” she thought, whimsically. “Not on account of any grief it might have caused--for I have no one to grieve for me,--but solely on my own part, for I should have been senseless, sightless, and tucked away in the earth, instead of being here in the blessed sunshine! No!--I shouldn’t have been tucked away in the earth, unless they had found my body and had a first-class funeral with Ma’s usual wreath lying on the coffin,--I should have been dashed about in the sea, and eaten by the fishes. Not half so pleasant as standing on the Pont du Mont Blanc and looking at the snowy line of the Alps! When people commit suicide they don’t _think_, poor souls!--they don’t realise that there’s more happiness to be got out of the daily sunshine than either money, food, houses, or friends can ever give! And one can live on very little, if one tries.” Here she laughed. “Though I shall have no chance to try! A thousand a year for a single woman, with a lovely home and ‘board’ thrown in, does not imply much effort in managing to keep body and soul together! Of course my work may be both puzzling and strenuous--I wonder what it will really be?” And she started again on her old crusade of “wonder.” Yet she did not find anything particular to wonder at in the appearance, manner, or conversation of Dr. Dimitrius. She had always “wondered” at stupidity,--but never at intelligence. Dimitrius spoke intelligently and looked intelligent; he did not “pose” as a wizard or a seer, or a prophet. And she felt sure that his mother would not limit her conversation to the various items of domestic business; she could not fancy her as becoming excited over a recipe for jam, or the pattern for a blouse. This variety of subjects were the conversational stock-in-trade of English suburban misses and matrons whose talk on all occasions is little more than a luke-warm trickle of words which mean nothing. There would be some intellectual stimulus in the Dimitrius household,--of that she felt convinced. But in what branch of scientific research, or what problem of chemistry her services would be required, she could not, with all her capacity for wondering, form any idea. She walked leisurely back to the hotel, looking at the shops on her way,--at the little carved wooden bears carrying pin-cushions, pen-trays and pipe-racks,--at the innumerable clocks, with chimes and without,--at the “souvenirs” of pressed and mounted _edelweiss_, inscribed with tender mottoes suitable for lovers to send to one another in absence,--and before one window full of these she paused, smiling.