AFTER a short tour through Italy, they had reached the Vesuvian Bay. As Mrs. Cultus expressed it, “Heretofore we have been visiting lakes and crypts, ruins and picture galleries, and now at last have met a volcano. It’s really beautiful, I assure you, quite as artistic as in pictures, and set in a frame of landscape which I don’t wonder artists love to paint. I feel just that way myself. Oh, it is so exquisite with these sloping shores! and in the distance that beautiful Island of Capri.”
Capri, the haunt of so many emperors in art as well as in government. Capri, favorite of the imagination, one of the enchanted isles, legendary locality, with its rustic stone ladder to ascend heavenward. Capricious Capri, with its grotto in blue, whereas ordinary mortals would be satisfied with grottoes in green. Picturesque Capri, with rocky foreground, no middle distance whatever, and several Paradises in the background. Mythological Capri, ever under the watchful eye of Minerva of the Promontory. Sportive Capri, with quails on toast, and woodcocks twice a year. Historic Capri, famous to the antiquary and modern economist; infamous, but only in days gone by.
All this appeared very mysterious on the morning that the Doctor looked from Capo da Monti over the Bay of Naples. The island, enveloped in light mist, hung, as it were, in mid-air between sea and sky. Adele and Paul were with him.
“Hazy atmosphere,” remarked the Doctor.
“I see violet tints,” remarked Adele. “I love violets.”
“It looks as if the island had no weight,” said Paul; “it might be blown away by the wind.”
“One of those atmospheric effects,” continued the Doctor, “which some artists portray with great success because much is left to the imagination.”
“Then the other fellow imagines what he likes best; safe, sure plan that; it just suits me,” said Paul. “All the pictures I had in my room at college had a ‘go’ in them, and I imagined what was coming.”
“Happy the artist who has the art of suggestion. It is a rare gift; inborn, I think—the power to make others complete the picture by reading their own best thoughts into it.”
“Some seem to care very little about what they say,” remarked Adele. “I never could understand why they paint a woman looking at herself in a glass; one’s back hair should not be the most conspicuous thing in the picture; and as to those extraordinary soap-bubble-cherubs, they don’t appeal to me, no matter how well they are painted.”