But the Rhone Valley, radiant in morning light, heaped coals of fire upon my head. I had maligned perfection. There was all the difference between the country between Brig and Martigny seen from a railway-carriage window, and seen from a motor car, that there is between the back of a woman's head when she is giving you the cut direct, and her face when she is smiling on you.
The Rhone Valley tame! The Rhone Valley monotonous! It was poetry ready for the pen of Shelley, and a scene for the brush of Turner. The little towns sleeping on the shoulders of the mountains, or rising turreted from hardy rocks bathed by the golden river; the peeps up cool lateral valleys to blue glaciers; the near green slopes and distant, waving seas of snowy splendour left a series of pictures in the mind; and best of all was Martigny's tower pointing a slender finger skyward from its high hill.
Late in the afternoon, as the car whirled us into the garden of the Hôtel Mont Blanc, we came face to face with two mules. They had brought back a man and a girl from some excursion. The landlord was at the door to receive his guests. Jack, Molly, and I flung the same question at his head, at the same moment. Was the situation as it had been when he telephoned? Could I hire a mule and a man, not for a day or two, but for a long journey—a journey half across the world if I liked?
The answer was that I might have five mules and five men for a journey all across the world if it were my pleasure.
It sounded like a problem in mental arithmetic, but I thanked my stars that there seemed no further need for me to struggle over its solution.
The Making of a Mystery
"There was the secret ...
Hid in ... grey, young eyes."
—Alice Meynell.
"Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more."
—Walt Whitman.