“Glorious girls they were,” said Willersley, and suddenly an immense sense of boredom enveloped me. I saw myself striding on down that winding road, talking of politics and parties and bills of parliament and all sorts of dessicated things. That road seemed to me to wind on for ever down to dust and infinite dreariness. I knew it for a way of death. Reality was behind us. Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral. “I'm not so sure,” he said in a voice of intense discriminations, “after all, that agricultural work isn't good for women.” “Damn agricultural work!” I said, and broke out into a vigorous cursing of all I held dear. “Fettered things we are!” I cried. “I wonder why I stand it!” “Stand what?” “Why don't I go back and make love to those girls and let the world and you and everything go hang? Deep breasts and rounded limbs--and we poor emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in us!...” “I'm not quite sure, Remington,” said Willersley, looking at me with a deliberately quaint expression over his glasses, “that picturesque scenery is altogether good for your morals.” That fever was still in my blood when we came to Locarno. 13 Along the hot and dusty lower road between the Orrido of Traffiume and Cannobio Willersley had developed his first blister. And partly because of that and partly because there was a bag at the station that gave us the refreshment of clean linen and partly because of the lazy lower air into which we had come, we decided upon three or four days' sojourn in the Empress Hotel. We dined that night at a table-d'hote, and I found myself next to an Englishwoman who began a conversation that was resumed presently in the hotel lounge. She was a woman of perhaps thirty-three or thirty-four, slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very abundant fair golden hair, the wife of a petulant-looking heavy-faced man of perhaps fifty-three, who smoked a cigar and dozed over his coffee and presently went to bed. “He always goes to bed like that,” she confided startlingly. “He sleeps after all his meals. I never knew such a man to sleep.” Then she returned to our talk, whatever it was. We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries and the usual topographical talk, and she had envied our pedestrian travel. “My husband doesn't walk,” she said. “His heart is weak and he cannot manage the hills.”