Penelopes Postscripts | Page 4

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
Madame de Stael was born and lived during many years of her life. We
had wandered through the shaded walks of the magnificent chateau
garden, and strolled along the terrace where the eloquent Corinne had
walked with the Schlegels and other famous habitues of her salon. We
had visited Calvin's house at 11 Rue des Chanoines, Rousseau's at No.
40 on the Grande Rue, and Voltaire's at Ferney.
And so we had been living the past, Salemina and I. But
"Early one morning, Just as the day was dawning."
my slumbering conscience rose in Puritan strength and asserted its
rights to a hearing.
"Salemina," said I, as I walked into her room, "this life that we are
leading will not do for me any longer. I have been too much immersed
in ruins. Last night in writing to a friend in New York I uttered the
most disloyal and incendiary statements. I said that I would rather die
than live without ruins of some kind; that America was so new, and
crude, and spick and span, that it was obnoxious to any aesthetic soul;
that our tendency to erect hideous public buildings and then keep them
in repair afterwards would make us the butt of ridicule among future
generations. I even proposed the founding of an American Ruin
Company, Limited,--in which the stockholders should purchase

favourably situated bits of land and erect picturesque ruins thereon. To
be sure, I said, these ruins wouldn't have any associations at first, but
what of that? We have plenty of poets and romancers; we could
manufacture suitable associations and fit them to the premises. At first,
it is true, they might not fire the imagination; but after a few hundred
years, in being crooned by mother to infant and handed down by father
to son, they would mellow with age, as all legends do, and they would
end by being hallowed by rising generations. I do not say they would
be absolutely satisfactory from every standpoint, but I do say that they
would be better than nothing.
"However," I continued, "all this was last night, and I have had a
change of heart this morning. Just on the borderland between sleeping
and waking, I had a vision. I remembered that to-day would be Monday
the 1st of September; that all over our beloved land schools would be
opening and that your sister pedagogues would be doing your work for
you in your absence. Also I remembered that I am the dishonourable
but Honorary President of a Froebel Society of four hundred members,
that it meets to-morrow, and that I can't afford to send them a cable."
"It is all true," said Salemina. "It might have been said more briefly, but
it is quite true."
"Now, my dear, I am only a painter with an occasional excursion into
educational fields, but you ought to be gathering stories of knowledge
to lay at the feet of the masculine members of your School Board."
"I ought, indeed!" sighed Salemina.
"Then let us begin!" I urged. "I want to be good to-day and you must be
good with me. I never can be good alone and neither can you, and you
know it. We will give up the lovely drive in the diligence; the luncheon
at the French restaurant and those heavenly little Swiss cakes" (here
Salemina was almost unmanned); "the concert on the great organ and
all the other frivolous things we had intended; and we will make an
educational pilgrimage to Yverdon. You may not remember, my
dear,"--this was said severely because I saw that she meditated
rebellion and was going to refuse any programme which didn't include

the Swiss cakes,--"you may not remember that