"Rome will remain, dear child, and you can come back some day."
"I know, and of course we have been here over two weeks now. Well, mother, I suppose we shall have to go."
"Don't say it so mournfully, my child. You will be delighted with Naples, with Sorrento, Amalfi, Capri, Pompeii."
"Oh, I know it. This earth has more in it than one can well see in a short lifetime. I can't understand how people can ever be bored."
"Like that awful Mrs. Ritchie on the steamer," said Nan; "she didn't know what places there were left to visit for she and her daughter had been everywhere. Shall you ever forget her blasé look and set smile?"
"Her name just suited her," declared Jo. "She was just rich and nothing else. I was so pleased when Miss Helen drew her out, and found that she had been only to the big cities and that she didn't know anything but shops, theatres and restaurants."
"There is no danger of this crowd ever getting bored," remarked Nan. "The trouble is we are too enthusiastic, for we like the little simple things as much as the big ones, and when we have exhausted our vocabularies over some small matter we have no words left to express what we feel for the great ones. Is go the word, mother?"
"Yes, I think it must be if we are to see anything of southern Italy before we sail for----"
"Home, home, sweet home," broke in a chorus of voices.
"And that is another thing to be enthusiastic about," said Nan at the close of the outburst. "There is the getting back and the seeing all the dear old places and the darling people."
"HEEL and toe, and away we go," sang Jack on the morning they were to start for Naples. "We've come down all through the boot leg, Jean, and now we're going toward the toe."
"It isn't really the toe when we stop," returned Jean. "Aunt Helen showed me on the map, and it isn't any further down than the ankle."
"Yes," admitted Jack. "There are more donkeys there than anywhere we have been," she went on, "and there are goats that walk up-stairs to be milked."
"We saw them milk goats in the streets of Paris. Don't you remember the man who used to come by early in the morning playing on the pipes, and how we used to get up and look out of the window to see him milk the goats?"