point of fastidiousness."

"Nonsense! it's the American woman who is fastidious, when it comes to
clothes."

Meanwhile, there was one of the party who was looking at the road; that
also was arrayed in Nile green and white; the tall trees also held
umbrellas above us, but these coverings were woven of leaves and sky.
This bit of roadway appeared to have slipped down from the upper
country, and to have carried much of the upper country with it. It was
highway posing as pure rustic. It had brought all its pastoral
paraphernalia along. Nothing had been forgotten: neither the hawthorn
and the osier hedges, nor the tree-trunks, suddenly grown modest at
sight of the sea, burying their nudity in nests of vines, nor the trick
which elms and beeches have, of growing arches in the sky. Timbered
farm-houses were here, also thatched huts, to make the next villa-gate
gain in stateliness; apple orchards were dotted about with such a
knowing air of wearing the long line of the Atlantic girdled about
their gnarled trunks, that one could not believe pure accident had
carried them to the edge of the sea. There were several miles of this
driving along beneath these green aisles. Through the screen of the
hedges and the crowded tree-trunks, picture succeeded picture; bits of
the sea were caught between slits of cliff; farmhouses, huts, and
villas lay smothered in blossoms; above were heights whereon poplars
seemed to shiver in the sun, as they wrapped about them their shroud-
like foliage; meadows slipped away from the heights, plunging seaward,
as if wearying for the ocean; and through the whole this line of green
roadway threaded its path with sinuous grace, serpentining, coiling,
braiding in land and sea in one harmonious, inextricable blending of
incomparable beauty. One could quite comprehend, after even a short