Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/257

Rh the phase is passing. It is certain that at this moment I could turn my back on Italy without regret. Six years ago I should have held such a temper impossible. Spain attracts me more.'

'My dear fellow,' said Randal, 'at thirty, let me repeat, the taste for lollipops deserts us, and we find them no longer endurable, except, perhaps, in the shape of acid drops. Italian music wearies me to death. The lovely nullity of the Italian women's faces is only the same thing in another shape. It makes you feel brutal. Spain is still pungent. Its popular music makes you vibrate and shiver, or fills your eyes with inexplicable tears. I found after a little that I even grew to like their country cuisine—their rotten cheese and blood-curdling wine, their greasy oils and onions. I am devoted to onions: you know it. And that devotion dates from my first winter in Southern Spain. Let us change our minds: leave Florence and Venice, Rome and Naples, to their own worn-out devices, and creep along by the coast railway round the feet of the Pyrenees into Gerona. We can get from there right down as far as Alicant—that's half-way to Gibraltar, and from there we could go to Madrid and return by the north; or, if you like, we could hold on a hundred miles or so past Alicant to Lorca, the terminus, and then make our way along the coast again, under the