"I am quite dizzy over it already. Don't let's write down any more till after we have seen these. Isn't it overpowering? London is nowhere. Paris is a mere nothing. I am perfectly wild with anticipation. It's Rome we are to see, that wonderful, wonderful city. The more I read about it the more enthusiastically bewildered I get. Hallo, Jo, what do you think of it? Do you know where we are going?"
"Don't speak to me," said Jo from the other end of the seat. "I am goose-flesh from top to toe. From this time out I expect to go about with my mouth agape and my eyes popping out. Oh, Nan, what would Frances Powers give to have this chance?"
"Poor Frances," returned Nan with a sigh.
"You always say that, and yet you are the one who has least reason to be sorry for her."
"Maybe that is just it," replied Nan. "I have so much reason to feel the other way that the pendulum has swung back. She has the worst of it."
"The girls are all home for the Easter holidays now," said Jo reflectively. "I think it will be rather good fun to go back there after all, and after this year's travel. Think what a sensation I shall make and what an authority I shall be, yet it will be rather hard to get into the traces again, and to subsist on the everlasting baked apples and baked beans."
"Our holiday has been a tremendously long one," said Nan, "for though we have done some studying, there is much of the time we have taken our mental nourishment in other ways than from books. I am glad Miss Barnes agreed that travel would count as study and that we should not lose by giving up school-books for part of the time. Who was Caracalla, Carter? I see something about the Thermæ of Caracalla here in the book."
"He was a Roman emperor of about 212 B. C."
"That's enough," cried Jo. "Anything B. C. gets beyond my assimilation. I can't digest it till I have taken a course of treatment, fish or brain food of some kind. I think while I am in Rome I must consult a physician and get him to recommend a diet that will increase my supply of gray matter."
"You certainly do talk funny, Jo Keyes," said Mary Lee. "You are always trying to make out that you haven't any brains, and yet you are always the one who rises to the occasion and who comes up smiling whatever the rest of us do. When Nan and I get completely snowed under by dates and chronological events you glibly reel them off and tell us that so-and-so was the daughter of King This-and-That, and that Emperor XYZ married Princess Tutti-Frutti. Why even that mixy up Bavarian history you had all smoothed out fine before we came away."