"The old German towns are fascinating," said Daphne.
"Nothing like them," said Berry. "I can smell some of them now. Can you not hear the cheerful din of the iron tires upon the cobbled streets? Can you not see the grateful smile spreading over the beer-sodden features of the cathedral verger, as he pockets the money we pay for the privilege of following an objectionable rabble round an edifice, which we shall remember more for the biting chill of its atmosphere than anything else? And then the musty quiet of the museums, and the miles we shall cover in the picture galleries, halting now and then to do a brief gloat in front of one of Van Stunk's masterpieces..."
"My heart leaps up when I behold a Van Stunk on the wall. Wordsworth knew his Englishman, didn't he?"
"Oh, well, if you're so dead against it—"
"Against it, dear. How can I be against it? Why, we may even be arrested as spies! There"—he looked round triumphantly—"who shall say that the age of romance is dead? Let us go forth and languish in a German gaol. Think of the notices we shall get in the papers! We'll give our photographs to The Daily Glass before we start. I expect we shall see one another in the chapel on Sundays, and I shall write to you in blood every day, darling, on a piece of my mattress. The letters will always be in the top left-hand corner of the steak pudding. Don't say I didn't tell you where to look."
"We shall be able to talk," said I—"by rapping on the wall, I mean."
"Certainly. Once for the letter A, twice for the chambermaid, three times for the boots. In the meantime, Jonah and you will each have removed a large stone from the floor of your cells by means of a nail which he found in his soup. Say you work sixteen hours out of the twenty-four you ought to have burrowed outside the gates in about five years."
Jill shuddered. "Austria would be rather nice, just now, wouldn't it?" she ventured.
"We could go high up if it got hot, of course," said Daphne slowly, "and the air's nice—"
"I'll find out what we do about shipping the car on Friday," said Berry.