Mentone, Cairo, and Corfu

Jane Jefferson and her accidental party reach Mentone in an omnibus creeping through a street like a catacomb, amid whip-cracks and the Professor’s lecture on medieval flagellants. By morning, the Mediterranean seems to pour through their windows.

In these late-nineteenth-century travel sketches, the journey ranges from sunlit Mentone to Cairo and Corfu. At a hotel above Mentone’s blue bays, Jane watches an unlikely company settle in: Mrs. Trescott, her watchful daughter Janet, a professor eager to explain everything, and fellow travelers whose remarks are rarely predictable. The sunshine may smooth even Mrs. Trescott’s brow, but it cannot make her moods any less mysterious—or keep strangers from falling under Janet’s spell. Through Jane’s dry, affectionate eye, landscapes become as lively as the people who gather before them. What will this accidental company discover in one another, and in the places that draw them onward?

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