‘See, Lamia! You are in Italy.’
LAMIA’S WINTER-QUARTERS
‘I wonder,’ said Lamia, ‘who invented the phrase, “the sunny South”?‘
‘A poet, no doubt,’ I answered, with perhaps a slight touch of malice; ‘one who, in Bacon’s phrase, accommodates the shows of things to the affections of the mind.‘
‘That is all very well when you are not in immediate contact with the things themselves. But here we have been for forty-eight hours, and we have not seen the sun yet. Tuscany could hardly have behaved worse.’
‘All of us, even the most prosaic,’ said the Poet, ‘are makers of phrases only approximately true; but even to-morrow perhaps you will have to own that this southward-sloping coast is not undeserving of its fame.’
He proved to be right. The following sunrise rebuked Lamia’s lament; and, when we assembled at breakfast in our English fashion, she declared she could have dressed before the open window, had Veronica but permitted it.