“Paris, quand?”
The inspector stared back, indignation displayed upon his countenance.
“Comment?”
“Non, quand,” said the elderly lady.
The inspector shrugged his shoulders and slammed the carriage-door as he retired.
“That man seemed rather stupid, I thought, Ethel.”
“Most stupid,” the ambitious Ethel emphatically agreed.
Nancy felt thankful that Letizia would be taught French properly. Sister Catherine had already suggested to her that when she was twelve she should be sent for three years to a convent in Belgium with which the Sisters of the Holy Infancy had an arrangement of exchanging pupils. Nancy had been a little alarmed at first by the prospect of sending Letizia abroad all that time; but after these two absurd Englishwomen she felt no trouble was too great and no place too far and no separation too long that would insure Letizia against talking French like them in public.
But presently Nancy was too much occupied with her own problems—transferring herself and her luggage from one station in Paris to another, finding out how the wagon-lit toilet arrangements worked, how to reply to the Italian examination of baggage in the Mt. Cenis tunnel, and how to achieve the change at Rome into the Naples train—either to criticise anybody else or even to dream and speculate about her own operatic future.
Then Vesuvius loomed above the russet orchards and dishevelled vines on the left of the railway. Nancy suddenly remembered that when she and Bram were first married he had one day said how much he should like to visit Naples with her. He had told her that he had seen a picture of it when he was a boy and of what a thrill it had given him. Now here it actually was, and he was not by her side to behold it. Here Naples had been all these years, and he had never seen it.