The opening of Chapter I
"I think, more than anything else, I came to be under blue sky."
"Are you fond of sky?" said the young girl who was sitting near the speaker, her eyes on the shimmering water of the lagoon which stretched north and south before the house.
"I can't lay claim to tastes especially celestial, I fear," answered the visitor, "but I confess to a liking for an existence which is not, for six months of the year, a combat. I am mortally tired of our long northern winters, with their eternal processions of snow, ice, and thaw--thaw, ice, and snow; I am tired of our springs--hypocritical sunshine pierced through and through by east winds; and I have at last, I think, succeeded in breaking loose from the belief that there is something virtuous and heroic in encountering these things--encountering them, I mean, merely from habit, and when not called to it by any necessity. But this emancipation has taken time--plenty of it. It is directly at variance with all the principles of the country and creed in which I was brought up."