I haven't, unfortunately, so that the world is full of places to which
I want to return--towns with the blinding white sun upon them;
stone pines against the blue of the sky; corners of gables, all
carved and painted with stags and scarlet flowers and crowstepped
gables with the little saint at the top; and grey and pink palazzi
and walled towns a mile or so back from the sea, on the
Mediterranean, between Leghorn and Naples. Not one of them did
we see more than once, so that the whole world for me is like spots
of colour in an immense canvas. Perhaps if it weren't so I should
have something to catch hold of now.

Is all this digression or isn't it digression? Again I don't know. You,
the listener, sit opposite me. But you are so silent. You don't tell
me anything. I am, at any rate, trying to get you to see what sort of
life it was I led with Florence and what Florence was like. Well,
she was bright; and she danced. She seemed to dance over the
floors of castles and over seas and over and over and over the
salons of modistes and over the plages of the Riviera--like a gay
tremulous beam, reflected from water upon a ceiling. And my
function in life was to keep that bright thing in existence. And it
was almost as difficult as trying to catch with your hand that
dancing reflection. And the task lasted for years.

Florence's aunts used to say that I must be the laziest man in
Philadelphia. They had never been to Philadelphia and they had
the New England conscience. You see, the first thing they said to
me when I called in on Florence in the little ancient, colonial,
wooden house beneath the high, thin-leaved elms--the first
question they asked me was not how I did but what did I do. And I