Page:Master Eustace (1920).djvu/70

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Master Eustace


breasted dove. Money, too, is a protection, and Diana had enough to purchase privacy. She traveled extensively, and saw all the churches and pictures, the castles and cottages included in the list which had been drawn up by the two friends in evening talks, at home, between two wax candles. In the evening they used to read aloud to each other from "Corinne" and "Childe Harold," and they kept a diary in common, at which they "collaborated," like French playwrights, and which was studded with quotations from the authors I have mentioned. This lasted a year, at the end of which they found themselves a trifle weary. A snug posting-carriage was a delightful habitation, but looking at miles of pictures was very fatiguing to the back. Buying souvenirs and trinkets under foreign arcades was a most absorbing occupation; but inns were dreadfully apt to be draughty, and bottles of hot water, for application to the feet, had a disagreeable way of growing lukewarm. For these and other reasons our heroines determined to take a winter's rest, and for this purpose they betook themselves to the charming town of Nice, which was then but in the infancy of its fame. It was simply one of the hundred hamlets of the Riviera,—a place where the blue waves broke on an almost empty strand, and the olive-trees sprouted at the doors of the inns. In those days Nice was Italian, and the