Oh! the waste of all those years!" "Waste ?" Mrs.Colwood probed the phrase a little.

Diana insisted, first with warmth, and then with an eloquence that startled her companion, that for an Englishwoman to be brought up outside England, away from country and countrymen, was to waste and forego a hundred precious things that might have been gathered up.

"I used to be ashamed when I talked to English people.

Not that we saw many.

We lived for years and years at a little villa near Rapallo, and in the summer we used to go up into the mountains, away from everybody.