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Braddon, M. E. (Mary Elizabeth), 1835-1915

"Phantom Fortune, a Novel"

'
'But you must be attached to a place in which your family have lived for
so many generations?'
'I like the stars and the sea, the mountains and savannas, the tropical
vegetation, and the dreamy, half-oriental life; but at best it is a kind
of stagnation, and after a residence of a few months in the island of my
birth I generally spread my wings for the wider world of the old
continent or the new.'
'You must have travelled so much,' said Lesbia, with a sigh. 'I have
been nowhere and seen nothing. I feel like a child who has been shut up
in a nursery all its life, and knows of no world beyond four walls.'
'Not to travel is not to live,' said Don Gomez.
'I am to be in Italy next November, I believe,' said Lesbia, not caring
to own that this Italian trip was to be her honeymoon.
'Italy!' exclaimed the Spaniard, contemptuously. 'Once the finishing
school of the English nobility; now the happy hunting-ground of the
Cockney tourist and the prosperous Yankee. All the poetry of Italy has
been dried up, and the whole country vulgarised.


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