“Surely,” Frances said.
“Your sketch is very sweet—it is full of feeling—there is no colour like that of the Riviera. It is the Riviera, is it not?”
“Oh yes,” cried Frances, eager to seize the opportunity of making it apparent that it was not only where she had been living, as her mother said. “It is from Bordighera, from our loggia, where I have lived all my life.”
“You will find no colour and no vegetation like that near London,” the young man said.
To this Frances replied politely that London was full of much more wonderful things, as she had always heard; but felt somewhat disappointed, supposing that his communications to her were to be more interesting than this.
“And the climate is so very different,” he continued. “I am very often sent out of England for the winter, though this year they have let me stay. I have been at Nice two seasons. I suppose you know Nice? It is a very pretty place; but the wind is just as cold sometimes as at home. You have to keep in the sun; and if you always keep in the sun, it is warm even here.”
“But there is not always sun here,” said Frances.
“That is very true; that is a very clever remark. There is not always sun here. San Remo was beginning to be known when I was there; but I never heard of Bordighera as a place where people went to stay. Some Italian wrote a book about it, I have heard—to push it, no doubt. Could you recommend it as a winter-place, Miss Waring? I suppose it is very dull, nothing going on?”
“Oh, nothing at all,” cried Frances eagerly. “All the tourists complain that there is nothing to do.”
“I thought so,” he said; “a regular little Italian dead-alive place.” Then he added after a moment’s pause: “But of course there are inducements which might make one put up with that, if the air happened to suit one. Are there villas to be had, can you tell me? They say, as a matter of fact, that you get more advantage of the air when you are in a dull place.”