But, after all, the somewhat grim-looking family which she adduced as refutation were really not exactly alive in any serious sense of the word. Truly living people are _always_ in some way beautiful. I left her pondering this risky statement while I prudently hastened on.
Our gallant author seemed to see things after a fashion of his own. One might, of course, summarily dismiss it as sentimentalism, but that would be meaningless, for our whole life is founded on sentiment of one kind and another. It is monstrous without it.
"He seems to think sentiment very important; more so than most men do," said Barbara, whose male relatives were mostly of a solid order.
A proverb, he points out, says that "one does not die of love: perhaps not; but what we know with absolute certainty, what stares us everywhere in the face in letters of fire and blood, is that one dies of the absence of love."
And it is always to women he looks for the founding of the gentler dispensation. He really does seem to appreciate us! He declares that we are one and all, without exception, "artists in happiness!"
"Oh! then he has never met Aunt Rebecca," said Barbara conclusively.
Only a few more days in Provence were now before us, and we had worked our way across country to the main line at Arles for the homeward journey.
It was a pleasure to find ourselves again in that strange flat country of the Crau and the Camargue, with the grey city on its hill above the Rhone.
We were wearied with the mad, sad doings of men and turned to the natural features of the surrounding country for rest and relief. And they did not fail us as far as interest was concerned. Only they, too, had their dramas and their tragedies. Those strange solitudes had a wild and stirring past; while the vast lagoons at the Rhone's mouth have a long story all to themselves.
Whole volumes have been written about their formation and the geological romance of this brilliant coast. Once, as we have seen, the Mediterranean washed the cliffs at Beaucaire and Nimes, and swept up to the base of the Alpilles. The country, in truth, seems to have retained something of the sea-song in its wide reminiscent spaces.
There were deluges and avalanches, and all sorts of exciting events of mountain and river; the Rhone and the Durance playing the principal parts in this melodrama of the elements. Those impulsive heroes carried off vast masses of stone and rubble from the mountains and covered the low-lying land with the "wreckage of the Alps."