"Well, but you could see it from a perfectly new point of view. You could
look at it as a sort of dispassionate witness, and treat it
humorously--of course it is ridiculous--and do something entirely fresh."

"It wouldn't work. It would be carrying water on both shoulders. The
fiction would kill the travel, the travel would kill the fiction; the
love and the humor wouldn't mingle any more than oil and vinegar."

"Well, and what is better than a salad?"

"But this would be all salad-dressing, and nothing to put it on." She was
silent, and he yielded to another fancy. "We might imagine coming upon
our former selves over there, and travelling round with them--a wedding
journey 'en partie carree'."

"Something like that. I call it a very poetical idea," she said with a
sort of provisionality, as if distrusting another ambush.

"It isn't so bad," he admitted. "How young we were, in those days!"

"Too young to know what a good time we were having," she said, relaxing
her doubt for the retrospect. "I don't feel as if I really saw Europe,
then; I was too inexperienced, too ignorant, too simple. I would like to
go, just to make sure that I had been." He was smiling again in the way
he had when anything occurred to him that amused him, and she demanded,
"What is it?"

"Nothing. I was wishing we could go in the consciousness of people who
actually hadn't been before--carry them all through Europe, and let them