"It's real pretty," her father admitted, "but awful small. It's something like a pocket edition, as you might say, Miss Free."
"I scarcely believe that anything could be more lovely," I declared.
"Well, of course you haven't been West yet," said Peaches cheerfully. "Then you'll see the real thing!"
"I shall never become a Californian, my dear," I put in mildly. "Do you know, sometimes I fear you tend to exaggerate in describing your native State?"
"Well, we produce the biggest crops in the world," she declared. "So why not the biggest liars, as well? Wait until you've been out on the coast yourself!"
And never to this day have I clearly understood what she meant by that. A great deal that Alicia said was difficult to understand. And nothing was more so than this insistence on her part that anything Californian was superior to everything European. After our visit to the Villa d'Este I gave up. She looked it over pleasantly and gave her verdict.
"I guess they copied it from the Gillespie place at Santa Barbara," she said; "only, of course, these hills are nothing as compared to the Coast Range for height."
It was just after this that I abandoned all effort to force a course in architecture, or indeed in any of the arts, upon Peaches. I began dimly to perceive that it was not only useless but that her education was not really impaired by the secession of my efforts along these lines. She possessed a faculty for picking out what she wanted to learn and learning it thoroughly. And after all that is the truest education, as my dear father used to say.
But I digress. Let us take up our sequence where Abby left me on that first afternoon.