III.
FRANCE.
'Girls, I have had a scintillation in the night: listen and approve!' said Amanda, coming into the room where her comrades sat upon the floor, in the first stages of despair, at the impossibility of getting the accumulated rubbish of three months' travel into a couple of immense trunks.
'Blessed girl! you always bring a ray of light just at the darkest moment,' returned Lavinia, with a sigh of relief, while Matilda looked over a barricade of sketch-books bristling with paint-brushes, and added anxiously,—
'If you could suggest how I am to work this miracle, you will be a public benefactor.'
'Behold the amendment I propose,' began Amanda, perching herself on one of the arks. 'We have decided to travel slowly and comfortably through France to Switzerland, stopping where we like, and staying as long as we please at any place we fancy, being as free as air, and having all the world before us where to choose, as it were.'
'The route you have laid out is a charming one, and I don't see how you can improve it,' said Lavinia, who, though she was supposed to be the matron, guide, and protector of the younger girls, was in reality nothing but a dummy, used for Mrs. Grundy's sake, and let the girls do just as they pleased, only claiming the right to groan and moan as much as she liked when neuralgia, her familiar demon, claimed her for its own.