You have had your moment; but you have not changed
the scene. The mountains are about you like a trap; you cannot foot
it up a hillside and behold the sea as a great plain, but live in
holes and corners, and can change only one for another.
CHAPTER X - HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS
THERE has come a change in medical opinion, and a change has followed
in the lives of sick folk. A year or two ago and the wounded
soldiery of mankind were all shut up together in some basking angle
of the Riviera, walking a dusty promenade or sitting in dusty olive-
yards within earshot of the interminable and unchanging surf - idle
among spiritless idlers; not perhaps dying, yet hardly living either,
and aspiring, sometimes fiercely, after livelier weather and some
vivifying change. These were certainly beautiful places to live in,
and the climate was wooing in its softness. Yet there was a later
shiver in the sunshine; you were not certain whether you were being
wooed; and these mild shores would sometimes seem to you to be the
shores of death. There was a lack of a manly element; the air was
not reactive; you might write bits of poetry and practise
resignation, but you did not feel that here was a good spot to repair
your tissue or regain your nerve.
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