“Well, how are the mountains using you, now?” he called out to his niece.
“Oh, I could shake them!” she declared. “Listen to this: 'A view of singular beauty, embracing the greater part of the Lake of Geneva, and the surrounding mountains, is suddenly disclosed.' That's where we are now--or were a minute ago. You can see that there is some sort of valley in front of us--but that is all. If I could only see one mountain with snow on it----”
“Why, it's all mountains and all snow, when you come to that,” Thorpe insisted, with jocose perversity. “You're on mountains yourself, all the time.”
“You know what I mean,” she retorted. “I want to see something like the coloured pictures in the hotels.”
“Oh, probably it will be bright sunlight tomorrow,” he said, for perhaps the twentieth time that day.
“There--that looks like water!” said Alfred. “See? just beyond the village. Yes, it is water. There's your Lake of Geneva, at all events.”
“But it isn't the right colour,” protested Julia, peering through the glass. “It's precisely like everything else: it's of no colour at all. And they always paint it such a lovely blue! Really, uncle, the Swiss Government ought to return you your money.”
“You wait till you see it tomorrow--or next day,” said the uncle, vaguely. He closed his eyes, and welcomed a drowsy mood. As he went off to sleep, the jolting racket of the train mellowed itself into a murmur of “tomorrow or next day, tomorrow or next day,” in his ears.
FROM their windows, high up and at the front of the big hotel, Julia looked down upon the Lake of Geneva. She was in such haste to behold it that she had not so much as unbuttoned her gloves; she held her muff still in her hand. After one brief glance, she groaned aloud with vexation.
Beyond the roadway, and the deserted miniature pier of Territet, both dishevelled under melting and mud-stained snow, there lay a patch of water--motionless, inconspicuous, of a faded drab colour--which at some small distance out vaguely ceased to look like water and, yet a little further out, became part and parcel of the dull grey mist. Save for the forlorn masts of a couple of fishing boats, beached under the shelter of the pier, there was no proof in sight that this was a lake at all. It was as uninspiring to the eye as a pool of drippings from umbrellas in a porch.