We had not been especially high-minded or educational in
Switzerland, Salemina and I. The worm will turn; and there is a
point where the improvement of one's mind seems a farce, and the
service of humanity, for the moment, a duty only born of a diseased
imagination.

How can one sit on a vine-embowered balcony facing lovely Lake
Geneva and think about modern problems,--Improved Tenements, Child
Labour, Single Tax, Sweat Shops, and the Right Training of the
Rising Civilization? Blue Lake Geneva!--blue as a woman's eye,
blue as the vault of heaven, dropped into the lap of the green
earth like a great sparkling sapphire! Mont Blanc you know to be
just behind the clouds on the other side, and that presently, after
hours or days of patient waiting, he may condescend to unveil
himself to your worshipful gaze.

"He is wise in his dignity and reserve," mused Salemina as we sat
on the veranda. "He is all the more sublime because he withdraws
himself from time to time. In fact, if he didn't see fit to cover
himself occasionally, one could neither eat nor sleep, nor do
anything but adore and magnify."

The day before this interview we had sailed to the end of the
sapphire lake and visited the "snow-white battlements" of the
Castle of Chillon; seen its "seven pillars of Gothic mould," and
its dungeons deep and old, where poor Bonnivard, Byron's famous
"Prisoner of Chillon," lay captive for so many years, and where
Rousseau fixes the catastrophe of his Heloise.

We had just been to Coppet too; Coppet where the Neckers lived and