Lizzie

15: Cannes, London, Liverpool — 1890

Lost in guilt: the certainty that what Alison had done to her, what she continued to allow her to do was Godless and evil, and that she would be punished as surely as had been Eve, whose transgression had eternally doomed all women to a monthly secretion of blood.

“But, why, oh why, dear Lizzie, any feelings of guilt? I should sooner slash my wrists than have you experience the slightest remorse. I have loved you from the instant I first laid eyes upon you — oh, that ridiculous journey from Oxford to London, where it was all I could do to keep my hands still, patting you and touching you at the merest provocation, smitten like a schoolgirl! And your own face, Lizzie — admit it — lighting with surprise and delight when first I entered the compartment. Did our eyes meet, or have I only dreamt it this past month and more? Did I see in your secret gray what was most surely in my revealing green? Oh, your radiant splendor! That fair complexion and dazzling red hair, I wondered in the very first instant — I shall blush myself now — whether you were tinted so below, and longed to lift your skirt and petticoats in that public conveyance, causing your Anna to die of mortification behind her veil. How jealous I was of your traveling companions! How silly, how hopelessly and immediately in love!

“But, guilt, Lizzie? If there truly exists this God you worship, if indeed His all-seeing eye monitors our daily movements, controls them perhaps, then was it an accident that He chose to have us meet? And having caused us to be thrown together that way, by the sheerest coincidence, as it seemed — you and your friends on the worst possible train to London, Albert and I catching a later train than we’d expected after an eternal visit with my cousin and her three squawling brats — no, it could not have been coincidence, it was certainly divine will, please don’t laugh, Lizzie. Your God chose to have us meet, chose to inspire our friendship, chose to have us meet again in Paris, chose indeed to have you stricken with influenza so that you might be here this very moment. And chose, my dearest darling, to encourage our intimacy, for which I have nothing but the humblest gratitude. Come to Him enwreathed in guilt then? Nay, Lizzie. Come to Him on your knees instead, in praise and in thanksgiving and in joy. Come to Him as I come to you — in bliss.”

Lost in shame: the discovery of herself as someone quite other than what she had supposed herself to be, a proper daughter and sister, a woman who was pious, virtuous, obedient and domestic — a lady.

“But how are you any less a lady now, Lizzie? Are your responses not ladylike? I find them exceedingly so. Are your kisses not the kisses a lady might offer to her love? Or do you speak of your passion? Is it your passion that shames you so? Then are we, as women, not entitled to the same passion men consider their God-given right? Are we any less ladies for being passionate women? Would it be any more ladylike, I ask, for me to touch, to stroke, to enflame not your miniature replica of the male sex organ — I shock my virgin, forgive me, I shall shift to less personal ground, I shall become objective. Do you consider it ladylike for any married woman to take into her hands a husband’s quivering worm and coax it to messy emission? I see that shocks you as well. Be shocked then, Lizzie, for it is shocking — to me, it is — and demeaning, and frankly disgusting, and not in the slightest bit ladylike. Nor can I find anything ladylike about a woman spreading her legs to a man’s masculine pride, and suffering his brutish batterings. A woman then becomes a beast of the field, and can scarce lay claim to being a lady. My hands upon your breasts are ladylike. My body pressed to yours is ladylike. My mouth upon your — if you blush again, I shall scream! You may be technically a virgin, but you are no longer a maiden in any sense of the word, so please don’t behave as foolishly as if you were Felicity-Twit! Oh, how I envied her place beside you in that hotel bed!

“That you should have come through puberty and adolescence, that you could have reached this advanced stage of your own womanhood without once having recognized the erotic potential of that adorable cleft between your legs is a matter of vast astonishment to me. I quite realize that our learned medical tomes prophesize disease or at least nervous prostration as the end result of self-manipulation, but never to have entertained the faintest curiosity about your own anatomy? Never once? Never to have explored yourself, to have touched yourself? Even in this male-dominated prison we share, I find that utterly incomprehensible. I asked you once if there were no looking glasses in all of Fall River. Here, now is a mirror — see how delicately the handle is formed of silver in the shape of a naked woman, her flowing tresses encircling the looking glass itself? Take her in your hands, Lizzie. Open your legs to her. Look upon yourself. Do you see your own lovely reflection? That is the lady within you, Lizzie, the true lady, known best and only by other ladies. Pull back her hood to reveal her pink hard face, lay your fingers delicately upon the center of your pleasure and desire, stroke her, Lizzie, stroke Miss Puss. She blushes as prettily as you do; I shall be compelled to kiss her in a moment.”

Lost in fear: the constant gnawing terror of discovery by the servants, for surely they were neither so stupid nor so blind as to not eventually recognize what transpired each night (and often during the mornings and afternoons) in the master bedroom on the second story of the villa.

“But we are careful, are we not, to properly rumple the bedclothes in your room, and to make certain you are there asleep in your virgin nightdress when Moira brings your morning tray? Sherlocks they may be — though I suspect the lot of them are rather dim-witted — but I doubt they have the slightest inkling of our true relationship. I will admit that there’s a kernel of truth in the adage that nothing escapes a good servant’s eye, be it a mote of dust or a secret liaison. But discretion is the better part of valor, is it not, and none of these worthless clods would be so foolish as to sacrifice a good position for the sake of a gossiping tongue.

“I have no idea what wages your Maggie back home is paid, but Moira earns fifty pounds annually, and cook forty-five. We pay George an additional forty, and Henry, the gardener, earns a hundred a year for allowing my precious orchids to die. As the monkey mentioned while urinating into the till, this certainly runs into a lot of money. Nor are they unaware of the perquisites of the journey to the Continent each summer and the attendant benefits of sunshine and a bit of sport with the local talent. Besides, to whom would they gossip, Lizzie? And for what purpose would they risk their good positions here? Should they care to tattle among themselves or to other servants, I care not a fig. Let their tongues wag. Such idle speculation rarely, if ever, reaches the ears of employers.

“I shall tell you something about servants, Lizzie, and you would do well to mind what I say. They are, in many respects, like children: dependent, fiercely loyal if they are treated kindly, and reluctant to believe the slightest harsh truth about mummy or daddy. Should they surprise us in flagrante delicto on the lawn — as we shall be careful they do not — they would turn a blind eye to such a glimpse of the primal scene, preferring to believe instead that they were surely mistaken, or else that what they witnessed was a privilege reserved to their wealthy and powerful ‘parents’. Like children, so long as they are kept in their proper place, they shall be blindly obedient — which is not to say that they can be trusted with intimacies beyond those they may divine but scarce believe.

“You must be careful, Lizzie, never to submit to the temptation of becoming overly — friendly, shall we say? — with any servant. This general rule goes unobserved by the ‘gentlemen’ of our time, who are weaned by nannies and often introduced to sex by upstairs maids, and who are not beyond dallying beneath the skirts of any willing household creature who may come within arm’s reach. But we, as women, are far more vulnerable and far less powerful, and we cannot afford the luxury of allowing any female employee to believe mistakenly that she — because of some indiscretion — is the true mistress of the house.”

“I’m not sure I know what you’re saying,” Lizzie said.

“Do you not? I’m advising you against any intimacy with a servant.”

“But who would even dream of...”

“I have dreamt it, and often. You have no idea how I’ve been tempted by the sight of voluptuous young Moira in her bath, those frisky Irish breasts spattered with freckles...”

“Moira!”

“Indeed.”

“But surely you’ve never...”

“Of course not, have you not been listening to me? Then hearken to my lesson once again. Never, but never, let a female employee tempt your fingers or your lips. You shall be eternally sorry if you do, I promise you.”

“The very thought that you could even imagine Moira as a...”

“Hush about Moira now, I regret having mentioned her. I am trying to tell you that our behavior here at the villa, so long as we are discreet and careful, is nothing more than is actually expected of us. Indeed, it is our female obligation to perform as we do in public. Would you not think it odd if your female friends did not laugh girlishly together, put their empty heads together to exchange delicate secrets, hold hands while walking, embrace in greeting, kiss in farewell? How often have you shared a bed with a lady friend on an overnight visit, undressed in the same room with her, kissed her cheek to bid her a pleasant good night, perhaps even slept in her arms to ward off the winter’s chill? None of this is thought upon with the slightest disfavor by the men who govern our lives; they consider it the way of women, the way they would have it, the way they have trained us to behave.

“They are aware, of course, that Lesbos floats adrift in the demi-monde — half the women you saw waltzing together at the Moulin Rouge, cheek to cheek, breast to breast, were undoubtedly lovers. Do you recall the ceiling of the couturier showroom we went to in Paris? On the day you took ill? Do you remember being informed that it had been painted by a Mademoiselle Abbema? Ah, well. Louise Abbema is a great friend of Augusta Holmes, a half-Irish blonde who in turn is chummy with Colette who, together with the Marquise de Belboeuf — Missy to her friends — is not entirely unfamiliar with Montmartre cellars like La Souris, and the Hannenton in the rue Pigalle, and the Rat Mort in the Place Pigalle. Familiar, in short, with the Parisian haunts of the so-called lesbienne in her mannishly styled jacket and shirt, though they themselves cannot be considered demimondaine in the strictest sense of the word. My point, Lizzie, is that whereas the activities of these conspicuous women might cause the faint lifting of an elegant eyebrow, yours and mine are above suspicion. For all the world to see and admire, we are behaving as proper ladies should behave, and whatever happens between us behind a locked door or on a secluded beach is something beyond the imagination of the men who have dictated our narrow ways. But there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy, Lizzie — if you will forgive my borrowing from the bard.

“I am sick unto death of their image of us, this myth they have created and which we are expected to uphold and, yet worse, defend. Our greatest secret, our supreme strength, is that no man on earth, no father, no son, could dare admit to himself that a proper lady — his daughter, his sister, his wife — would ever commit a breach that seriously threatened his superior position in the society he has constructed and which he will support with his very life. For should he once believe of any one of us that we might so rebel against the absurd rules and regulations proscribing the periphery of our lives, then he must perforce believe that we are all capable of bringing down his elaborate house of cards and thereby destroying his faith in the cherished myth of ideal womanhood — the Lady, Lizzie. The Lady I despise with all my heart.

“Did you know that Louise Abbema wrote a song some years ago, in French to be sure, and that it has become very popular now? I shall sing it for you, if you will forgive my flat English voice rendering her liquid French lyrics:

“I shall loosely translate the lyrics for you, Lizzie, and in prose that does them no justice, I fear. ‘Toward them, toward them, love, take us on your beating wings. Toward them, toward them, the blonde, the fair, the beautiful. Toward them, so distant, there, away, yet farther still. Toward them, toward them — the golden-haired maidens’.

“She tails it ‘Hymn to Love’, my dearest love.”

Lost in love: a love she had never experienced before, a love beyond filial affection, beyond sisterly concern, beyond (God forgive her!) the love imbued in her for the flesh and the spirit of the savior Jesus Christ, a new and precious love that was in turn giddy and solemn and sacred and nourishing and sad and glowing and present every waking or sleeping moment of her days and nights at the villa. The mere sight of Alison was enough to set her heart tripping, her golden hair in the golden sunlight (though now, in mid-September, there was rain more often than not), her radiant smile, the maidenly perfection of her face and form (“Maiden indeed! I’ve been mistress of the house for years now, your Mistress Puss, Lizzie”), her long-legged stride, her pealing laughter, the scent of her, the coconut oil forsaken now that she was brown as an African, the fragrance of mimosa (or was it only from the hills?). The need she felt for her was incessant, an aching to be held by her, to feel her hands upon her where before now not even her own hands had dared, to seek approval in her marvelous green eyes, to abandon herself utterly to the extravagance of her passion.

Lost in anxiety: the concern that Albert would return to the villa sooner than anticipated, the certainty that whenever he returned, his presence would effectively end the ecstasy she shared with Alison.

“But why didn’t you tell me this earlier?” Alison asked. “It can be settled with a telegram; I shall send one off tomorrow morning.”

“A telegram? But how?”

“My darling girl,” Alison said, “let me explain the rather dismal arrangement Albert and I have evolved over the years. You must have noticed, though you claimed not to have, that Albert has an eye for the ladies, as revealed through his constant exploration of Felicity-Twit’s bottom, and his obvious enthrallment with the prostitute who solicited une bière Anglaise from him — or weren’t you aware of her occupation?”

“I suspected,” Lizzie said, smiling.

“Ah, she suspected, my virgin queen. Accept her sordid trade, then, and accept the fact that had Albert been alone, he would have immediately struck up a bargain with her and followed her to some hotel de passe redolent of disinfectant, where there he would have ravaged her on sheets stinking of sailors’ sweat and sperm.” She rolled her eyes. “But eet ees zee way of zee men, n’est-ce pas?” she said, falling into her broad French accent, “to ex-air-size zee doigt de seigneur, pun intentional,” she said in her normal voice, “and to plunge that raging tumescent beast into whichever rotting hole opens itself before them, however disease ridden, however slippery it might be from the juices of previous conquerors — amour, amour, toujours l’amour! I could understand his longings to strip Felicity-Twit to the skin — he confessed this to me one night — but when it comes to his penchant for the bony ladies who...”

“What do you mean you can understand...?”

“I was tempted to do so myself,” Alison said. “Such a figure, my God, I would have wallowed in it like a pig in mud.”

“But you didn’t once really consider...”

“Oh, I did, I did. More often than once. In fact, had I not been so hopelessly in love with you...”

“How can I believe that now?” Lizzie said.

“See how prettily she pouts,” Alison said.

“Felicity! The idea!”

“A marvelous idea, when one considers it,” Alison said, and burst into laughter. “I never so much as touched her even grazingly,” she said. “I’d have met Albert’s hand halfway there, I imagine. My point, dear Lizzie...”

“Would you have?”

“Done what? Licked her clean as a platter, had the opportunity been golden? Perhaps. I was so mad with desire for you that I might have leapt upon a broomstick had it chanced across my path.”

“I shall never believe you again,” Lizzie said. “Never.”

“To disbelieve truth is to invite deception,” Alison said. “My point, dear Lizzie, is that given Albert’s lascivious bent, and given my own... preferences, shall we say?... he is only too eager to seek his pleasure wherever he might find it, and to grant to me a privacy of my own. A civilized arrangement, you will admit, and one that allows for inventive accommodation. I can easily forestall him, if indeed he’s the cause of that puckered frown on your...”

“My frown has nothing to...”

“Most unattractive, I might add. I shall telegraph him in the morning to report that the weather here has turned beastly — as indeed it should within the next week or so — and that he would do well to linger in Germany, or perhaps go on to Italy where there will be sunshine for a good while yet. He will understand completely. You certainly didn’t believe that mere financial matters would have kept him in Berlin even this long? Die kleinen Puppen perhaps, but not die Börse.”

“So he’s had other women,” Lizzie said.

“Yes.”

“And you knew of them — know of them.”

“Yes.”

“And you?”

“Ah.”

“Have there been... other women for you as well?”

“The eternal question,” Alison said, and sighed.

“Have there been?”

“But honesty so offends you.”

“Tell me.”

“Yes.”

“Many?”

“Enough.”

“And other men as well?”

“One before Albert... and he not quite a man. None since.”

“Who?”

“The man? The boy, actually. The women? The lot of them?”

“You make them sound like an army!”

“Not quite. A brigade, perhaps.”

“Who?”

“See how jealous she becomes!”

“Who, Alison?”

“The women were a varied lot. A marquise here, a matchgirl there, you know how ferocious my appetite can be, Lizzie.”

“And the man? The boy, as you call him.”

“A boy indeed. Fair-haired and handsome, and as eager to experiment as I myself was.”

“Where?”

“In London.”

“When?”

“We were both thirteen.”

“Both...?”

“My brother. My twin. My dearest love, Geoffrey.”

Lost in knowledge.

Eve’s sin.

From which, once disclosed, once learned, there was no retreat.

The torrential rains of autumn came early that year, sooner than Alison had expected, although she seemed delighted that now there would be wild daisies on the hillsides. On a Sunday when the servants were gone and the villa was still they lay naked beside each other in Alison’s bed, the covers pulled to their throats, the rain beating against the windowpanes as she talked quietly of Geoffrey again. Lizzie listened with the same inexplicable, jealous anger she had experienced when first she’d learned of their reckless adventure, Alison saying now that their early experiments had continued well into their late adolescence and beyond, in fact until the time she was twenty-three and betrothed to Albert by her father, who was then still alive.

“Always the lordly succession to power and control,” she said, “male to male, with never a regard for the feelings or wishes of the female involved. I should have been content to have spent the rest of my life in clandestine embrace with Geoffrey — oh, the vast secret we shared in that musty London house my father called our home! I would, in fact, leap into bed with him again in an instant, even now, had not his own interests become so... Wilde-like, shall we say?”

“Wildlike?” Lizzie said, consumed with jealousy, her voice angry and tight. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Are you not familiar with Oscar Wilde? He’s one of our more celebrated authors, and purportedly as ‘so’ as a turnip.”

“As ‘so’?”

“As queer, Lizzie.”

“Odd, do you mean?”

“Odd, yes. But also queer.”

“I still don’t know what you mean.”

“Why, homosexual, Lizzie.”

“Are you saying Geoffrey is homosexual?”

“Oh, quite.”

“I don’t believe it!”

“Can you believe that I am? That you yourself are?”

“But I’m not!”

“Lesbian to the core,” Alison said, and laughed softly, and suddenly put her hand upon her. Lizzie leaped in surprise. “Have I startled Miss Puss?” Alison said, “There, there,” she said, stroking her, “be calm, sweet lady, stai calma, I shall smooth your ruffled feathers.”

“I’m... not at all what you think,” Lizzie said. “What you... say I am.”

“Then you’re simply not, of course, and we have no argument,” Alison said.

“I should never want another woman but you,” Lizzie said. “I should never dream of allowing anyone else to do to me...”

“Never say never,” Alison said.

“Though I’m certain that the moment I’m gone, you shall tumble into bed with the nearest...”

“More than likely,” Alison said. “But we have time yet.”

“Little more than a month.”

“An eternity,” Alison murmured.

“Alison... if we’re to talk...”

“Yes?”

“You must stop doing that. Really.”

“Is Miss Puss becoming agitated? Then stop I shall, for talk I would. There’s nothing I enjoy better, in fact, than recalling the days of my wanton youth.”

“And now you’ll try to make me jealous again, won’t you?”

“No, no.”

“Oh, yes, yes, I know you too well, Alison.”

“As well you should. I’m a reflection of yourself, Lizzie.”

“Hardly.”

“Your very soul.”

“Damned to Hell forever.”

“For loving?”

“For sinning.”

“I’ve known greater sinners who are doubtlessly strumming harps and floating on clouds this very moment.”

“Have you glimpsed Heaven then, to know...?”

“You’re my Heaven, Lizzie.”

“As was Geoffrey.”

“Indeed. When first we...”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

“Very well then.”

The rain beat upon the windowpanes. There was a harsh wind now, rattling the leaves in the trees outside. From very far away, Lizzie could hear the angry motion of the sea.

“Tell me,” she said.

“Have you changed your mind then? A moment ago...”

“Tell me,” Lizzie said.

“Your servant, of course,” Alison said, and smiled. “But, oh dear, where shall I begin? We were innocents, you understand, and had not yet been exposed to the witless sexual theories expounded by all those lofty cocks of the walk represented in my father’s medical volumes — have I told you he was a physician, my father? The irony of his death, in fact, was that he was unable to diagnose his own disease. But high on a shelf in his library were the dusty tomes containing the sexual secrets of the universe, known by us to be there, of course — there is little that can be kept from bright, inquisitive children — some of which I would rather not have learned, believe me. Can you imagine medical practitioners advocating the removal of a woman’s ovaries rather than admitting that the natural stirrings she feels in her vagina are prompted by passion and not ‘female’ malfunction? Ah, yes, Lizzie, you have no idea how many women in our day — but that’s another story, as our Mr. Kipling might say.

“One rainy afternoon — it’s always raining when children make their most important discoveries, isn’t it? — one rainy afternoon, my brother Geoffrey mounted a ladder and took down from my father’s topmost shelf a book we perused with considerable interest. And there, all at once, in full color, and occupying a full page of the volume, were drawings side by side of the male sex organ and its female counterpart. Well! I might add that the drawing of the female organ was rendered in more excruciating detail than that of the male, but perhaps this was due more to the fascination of the artist than to any sense of dedication on the parts of the physicians who’d compiled the volume. But who can say? Physicians today certainly seem steadfast in their dedication to scooping out our insides as if we were melons. I digress.

“Naturally curious, alone in the house — was my mother off to a British equivalent of the quatre à cinq? I shouldn’t be surprised, for her upbringing was European, and she was surely familiar with the ways of the world, and less bound to propriety than the proper London ladies of her time — nonetheless, alone and curious, the servants God only knew where, the library door locked, we decided to compare against the drawings in my father’s text the — how shall I put it? — the real life articles. So my brother unfastened his trousers and we examined his penis at great length, no pun intended, and then to correct the gap — again no pun intended — in my own education, I lifted my skirts, and lowered my knickers and opened my legs to him.

“I scarcely had pubic hair then, I don’t really recall. A gentle down, I believe, hardly similar to the savage bush I now possess — the ‘golden bramble’, Geoffrey used to call it, but that was when we were a bit older. Using a looking glass we took down from the mantel, and much as I showed you to yourself not very long ago, I sat with limbs akimbo while we both stared in wonder at the bewildering labyrinth of fold upon fold of tissue, Geoffrey reciting aloud the anatomical words for what until then I scarcely knew I had between my legs — well, let me reconstruct the scene for you, Lizzie,” she said, and suddenly threw back the covers.

“No, don’t!” Lizzie cried, and hurled herself upon her. “I don’t want to hear another word, I shan’t be able to stand it!” Kissing her fiercely, she murmured, “I love you so much, oh God, I love you to death,” crushing herself hungrily against her, and knowing in that instant that Alison was as much her own twin as she was Geoffrey’s. And suddenly, confronted with this darker knowledge, she wondered which of them — she or Alison — truly controlled their tumultuous joinings, and realized all at once that it was beyond the control of either; they were only what they were; she was all that Alison said she was. She allowed the raging sea to wash over her then, accepting wave after wave, no longer caring what she was or might become, no longer trying even to guess who this woman drowning in the arms of another woman might be.

On the twenty-third of October, they returned to London, where Lizzie was reunited with her friends at the Hotel Albemarle. Her letters to them had been full of lies about her continuing frailty, and they were surprised to see her looking in such good health, though, in fact, the color she had picked up in Cannes had faded with the September rains, and the unusually cold winds of October had kept her and Alison indoors much of the time.

Felicity confessed that a gondolier in Venice had pinched her bottom.

Rebecca said that her German had served them beautifully in Munich and Berlin, but that it had not been understood as well in the smaller towns.

Anna complained that the food had been virtually inedible everywhere — “especially in Italy”.

She saw Alison for the last time on a blustery cold Saturday, two days before she and her friends were to sail home from Liverpool. In the Burlington Arcade that morning, she bought Alison a small pillbox with the sentiment Thine Forever enameled in black script lettering on its bright pink top. She gave it to her over lunch at Gatti’s in the Strand. Alison’s farewell gift was a brilliant red orchid. To the crowds passing by outside the restaurant later that afternoon, the two women in tearful embrace on the sidewalk must have seemed indeed a commonplace. They kissed once more, lingeringly, and then walked off in separate directions, their heads bent against the wind blowing fiercely all about them.

The stateroom she and Anna were to share on the homeward voyage was the same one they had occupied on the outward journey, a luxurious compartment on the promenade deck, fitted with two bedsteads, wardrobes, armchairs, a writing table and a couch. A stained-glass shutter screened the window, and late October sunshine filtered through it, dappling with oranges, reds, yellows and blues the bed upon which Lizzie sat. Across the cabin Anna was unpacking. When Lizzie burst into sudden tears, she could not for the life of her imagine what the matter was.

“Lizzie?” she said, coming to her. “Are you all right, dear? You’re not taking ill again, are you?”

Lizzie shook her head.

“Then what is it?” Anna asked.

Lizzie choked back a sob, and then dabbed at her eyes with a lace-trimmed handkerchief. “I wish we weren’t going home so soon,” she said, tears brimming in her eyes again.

“Soon? But Lizzie, we’ve been gone...”

“Oh, Anna,” she said, “I’ve had such a happy summer!”

“Well, we all have, dear. But that’s no reason to...”

“I shall never be so happy again,” Lizzie said.

“Of course, you will. Lizzie, Lizzie...”

“Never,” Lizzie said. “My home shall be such an unhappy one now, I know it! I wish I could stay here forever, I wish I could...” and she burst into fresh tears again. “Such an unhappy home,” she sobbed into her handkerchief, “such an unhappy one.”

Patting her hand, embracing her — but not too closely, for Lord knew what she might be coming down with now — Anna tried to understand what Lizzie had meant. A happy summer? Why, she’d been sick most of the time! And she’d missed most of France, and all of Italy and Germany!

So far as Anna could see, Lizzie had hardly made any journey at all.