o 3b3e7475144cf77c

exchange; the richer they were, the more welcome—a rule that holds good in most parts of the

world. They engaged three cars and were driven about the town, which is crowded between

mountains and sea, and since it cannot float on the latter is forced to climb the former.

Ancient tall buildings jammed close together; churches having facades with stripes of white

and black marble, and inside them monotonous paintings of sorrowful Italian women with

infants in their arms. Before the shrines were wax images of parts of the body which had been

miraculously healed, displays not usually seen outside of hospitals. Mr. Dingle might have

been interested, but he had a deep-seated prejudice against the Catholic system, which he

called idolatrous. Mr. Hackabury had had the same idea.

Lanny showed them the old Palazzo di San Giorgio, where the conference had been held, a

dingy and depressing place, in keeping with the results of the assemblage. Lloyd George had

made the most inspiring promises of peace and prosperity to the representatives of twenty-

nine nations; after which, behind the scenes, the leaders had spent six weeks wrangling over

what oil concessions the Russians were to make to what nations. Lanny's father had been here,

trying to get a share; it had been his first fiasco, and the beginning of a chain of them for all

parties concerned. Instead of peace the nations had got more armaments and more debts.

Instead of prosperity had come a financial collapse in Wall Street, and all were trembling lest

it spread to the rest of the world.

XI

All this wasn't the most cheerful line of conversation for a sight seeing jaunt; so Lanny

talked about some of the journalists and writers whom he had met at this conference, and

forbore to refer to the tragic episode which had cut short his stay in Genoa. But later, when

Irma and Rahel had gone back to the yacht, he went for a stroll with Hansi and Bess, and they

talked about the Italian Syndicalist leader who had set them to thinking on the subject of social

justice. The young Robins looked upon Barbara Pugliese as a heroine and working-class

martyr, cherishing her memory as the Italians cherish that virgin mother whose picture they

never grow tired of painting. But the Fascist terror had wiped out every trace of Barbara's

organization, and to have revealed sympathy for her would have exposed an Italian to exile

and torture on those barren Mediterranean islands which Mussolini used as concentration camps.

When you talked about things like this you lost interest in ancient buildings and endlessly

multiplied Madonnas. You didn't want to eat any of the food of this town, or pay it any foreign

exchange; you wanted to shake its polluted dust from your feet. But the older people were here

to entertain themselves with sight-seeing; so, take a walk, climb the narrow streets up into the

hills where the flowers of springtime were thick and the air blew from the sea. These gifts of

nature were here before the coming of the miserable Fascist braggart, and would remain long

after he had become a stench in the nostrils of history. Try not to hate his strutting Blackshirts

with their shiny boots, and pistols and daggers in their belts; think of them as misguided children,

destined some day to pay with their blood for their swagger and bluster. "Father, forgive them,

for they know not what they do!"

And when you come down from the heights and get on board the yacht again, keep your

thoughts to your own little group, and say nothing to your elders, who have grown up in a

different world. You cannot convert them; you can only worry them and spoil their holiday.

Play your music, read your books, think your own thoughts, and never let yourselves be drawn

into an argument! Not an altogether satisfactory way of life, but the only one possible in times

when the world is changing so fast that parents and children may be a thousand years apart in

their ideas and ideals.

3

And Their Adoption Tried

I

TНЕ trim white Bessie Budd was among the Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved

and sung, and where Lanny at the age of fourteen had fished and swum and climbed hills and

gazed upon the ruins of ancient temples. The yacht stole through the Gulf of Corinth and made

fast to a pier in the harbor of the Piraeus, now somewhat improved; the guests were motored to

the city of Athens, and ascended the hill of the Acropolis on little donkeys which had not been

improved in any way. They gazed at the most-famous of all ruins, and Lanny told them about

Isadora Duncan dancing here, and how she had explained to the shocked police that it was her

way of praying.

The Bessie Budd anchored in the Channel of Atalante, and the experienced Lanny let down

fishing-lines and brought up odd-appearing creatures which had not changed in sixteen years,

and perhaps not in sixteen million. The guests were rowed ashore at several towns, and drank

over-sweet coffee out of copper pots with long handles, and gazed at the strange spectacle of