"You have been poring over it for half an hour. I suppose it's poetry," Barbara went on, with philosophical but not at all disdainful aloofness from that particular form of human aberration.
"No—o; not conventionally speaking, poetry."
In truth it was the local time-table.
But it was poetry after all. Consider the list of names: Avignon, Tarascon, Beaucaire, Arles, Nimes, Montpellier, Béziers, Carcassonne, Albi, Aigues Mortes, Carpentras, Cabestaing, Uzès, Vaucluse, L'Isle sur Sorgue, Aix-en-Provence—all printed irreverently in heartless columns, as if they were not worth mentioning except for their relation to time and tide.
"Now which of all these desecrated shrines of history shall we go to?"
Barbara said they were one and all Greek to her at present, and she would be happy with any of them.
"Suppose we just drift along this line—this bejewelled line—and let things happen to the south-east, with only a few tooth-brushes in a hand-bag?"
Barbara was perfectly willing, but said she must take a night-gown and a comb as well.
It was a glorious morning when the train puffed out of the station at Avignon and took a sharp swerve in order to give us a fine last view of that "little city of colossal aspect," as Victor Hugo calls it. Always that dominating palace on the height stretching long and massive across the hillside. The high mountains to the south-east stood entrancingly blue, Mont Ventoux looking as heavenly and innocent as if the bare thought of harbouring—much more of deliberately producing a mistral were a baseness of which she was utterly incapable. She would hesitate at so much as a stiff breeze! Yet we had caught her in the act but yesterday and had left behind in our boxes damning proof of her guilt in the remnants of two once quite respectable hats which her protégé had playfully divided into segments as we crossed the street to post our letters.