“Would you like to exchange?” she asked, smiling.
“Wouldn’t I!”
“Very well, we will!” she said, playfully. “I will throw in a view of the city and the bay, with a bit of Pozzuoli, and a big garden, and all the statues you can talk to, and an olive orchard that runs down hill to the sea, and a frog pond....”
“There are worse things!” interrupted Martin.
“What?” she demanded, eyeing him curiously.
“New England!” he exclaimed, with a laugh.
“I suppose you will think so,” she rejoined gravely, “until you have sat by yourself in a tower and listened to frogs in a pond. For that matter, though, the frogs are what I like best.” She looked out again across the Maremma. The sea began to widen in the sunset, toward which the Arno ran in links of brightening fire. “No,” she said at last. “It is not for us.”
“What?” he asked.
“This!” she answered, waving her hand against the golden space before them. “We are of the North. We belong to mist and pallor and dreams. Here they have no dream. What is there left for them to dream about? They live. But we don’t know how to live. We are always waiting—or remembering.”
“As a background, however, I would prefer Campania to Vermont!”