Perhaps Even This Was Partly Fancy;
As For The Flowers, I Cannot Bring Myself To Partake Of Their Deceit;
For
They are the most shameless fakers, as regards climate, in nature.
It is, for instance, perfectly true that they are
In bloom along the
Riviera all winter long, but this does not prove that the winter of the
Riviera is always warm. It merely proves that flowers can stand a degree
of cold that nips the nose bent to hale their perfume, and brings tears
into the eyes dwelling in rapture on their loveliness. They are like
women; they look so fragile and delicate that you think they cannot
stand anything, but they can stand pretty much everything, or at least
everything they wish to. Throughout that week at Monte Carlo, while we
cowered round our fires or went out into a frigid sunshine, the flowers
smiled from every garden-ground in a gayety emulous of that of their
sisters passing in white serge. So probably I gave less attention to the
details of the scenery through which my funicular was passing than to
the stupendous prospects of sea and shore which it varyingly commanded.
If words could paint these I should not spare the words, but when I
recall them, my richest treasure of adjectives seems a beggarly array of
color tubes, flattened and twisted past all col-lapsibility. Nothing
less than an old-fashioned panoramic show would impart any notion of it,
and even that must fail where it should most abound, namely, in the
delicacy of that ineffable majesty.
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