I have seen Naples, but I don't wish to die. Not that I should so much grudge dying after the happy life you've given me, but there'd be such an awful waste of time in staying dead when so much is left to see. There's Capri, and there's Sicily almost next door; and even a Saturday to Monday on Mars wouldn't make up to me for missing them.
We put our hands to the plough, and came here from Rome in six hours, only one hour more than the fast (?) train takes. We didn't stop for lunch, but kept ourselves up on beef lozenges, which were nasty but supporting. We wanted to see how quickly we could do it, and even Aunt Mary was excited. She is much pleasanter without Jimmy, and we really did have fun. It's an ill rain that doesn't temper the dust to an automobile, so we blessed the weather which we had previously anathematised. After a pouring night, it cleared before we started; and it was one of the best days we have ever had. I remembered heaps of things which had happened to me when I was a Roman princess, two thousand years ago, and felt just as if I were travelling in my chariot from my father's palace in Rome to his villa, perhaps in Baiæ. My only fear was that, in going so fast, we should arrive at our destination so long before the impedimenta that I should have to do without my baths of asses' milk for several days; and where would be my royal complexion?
It was six o'clock, and dark, when we came in sight of something which made me cry out "Oh!" It was a dull red light, high up in the sky, and a dark shape, like a great wounded bull, with two streams of fiery blood pouring down its gored sides. Vesuvius! Brown had planned that we should see it for the first time after dark. I had wondered why he suggested not leaving Rome till twelve o'clock, when usually he is so keen on early starts, and he was evasive when I asked why. But when I had breathed that "Oh!" and had a moment to recover myself, he told me.
Dad, dear, Brown is splendid. He has revealed Naples to me. I can't express it in any other way, for nobody else who has told me about coming to Naples has ever done the things that we have; and they would not have occurred to Aunt Mary or me. We should have gone the ordinary round if it hadn't been for him, and when we said good-bye to her Naples would have been only a mere acquaintance of ours, not a dear and intimate friend who has told us her best secrets. In the first place, we shouldn't have known any better than to stop in some big, obvious sort of hotel in the noisy wasps' nest of the city, instead of coming here where the air is pure and some of the most beautiful things in the world in sight without turning our heads. It's such a homelike hotel, and instead of sending to England for orange marmalade made of Sicilian oranges, the way all the other hotels seem to do, they make it themselves out of their own oranges; and it's a poem.
We've been up Vesuvius, not in the daytime, like the humdrum tourists, but by torchlight, and we saw the moon rise. Instead of rushing to the Museum the first thing and mooning vaguely about there for hours, we saved it until after we'd been out to Pompeii on the motor-car; then it was a hundred times more interesting, and we are coming back after Capri to pay another visit to the busts of Tiberius and his terrible mother. I felt in Rome as if it were an impertinence to be modern and young. But in Pompeii-oh, I can't tell you what I felt there. I think-I really do think that I saw ghosts, and they were much more real and important than I. It was like entering the enchanted palace of the Sleeping Beauty in the wood, only a thousand times more thrilling and wonderful. I didn't feel as if anyone else had ever been there since it was dug up, except Brown and me-and, of course, Aunt Mary.
Brown knew about fascinating Italian restaurants, and he drove us up on the automobile for tea to a new hotel on a high hill, almost a mountain. It's the "smart" thing for people who know to go up to tea, which-if it's fine-you have on a great terrace that is the most beautiful thing in all Naples. And we spent a whole morning up at St. Elmo. That is going to be my best recollection, I think, and-you will laugh-but the next best will be the Aquarium. When you came to Naples was there a thing in the Aquarium like the ghost of a cucumber, transparent as glass, with strings of opals and rubies being drawn through its veins every two minutes regularly? Brown says that it-or its ancestor-has been there ever since he can remember. I like that green light in the Aquarium, which makes you feel as if you were a mermaid under the sea, and inclined to swim instead of walk.
When we were driving up to the hotel, Brown said it was almost as steep and winding as the road from Capri to Anacapri. That speech, and gazing from our balcony at Parker's over the blue bay to the island which looks like the Sphinx rising out of the sea, have made me distracted to take the automobile to Capri. Brown "doesn't advise it," and thinks "we may have great trouble in landing," but that makes me want the adventure all the more; so we're going to-morrow-not just for a day, like the people who don't care about Tiberius, and think the Blue Grotto is the only thing to see-but to stay for several days. Brown says one could find a new walk on the island for every day of a whole month, and each would be absolutely different from the other, though Capri is only three and a half miles long and about a mile and a half in width.
I feel as if we were in for something exciting, just as you feel, I suppose, when you are going to bring off a big coup "in the street."
Your Chip-of-the-old-Block,
Molly.