Katy Carr, grown up and long recovered from the fall that crippled her girlhood, is invited to Europe by a young widow, Mrs Ashe, as companion to her and her little daughter Amy - storybook England, Paris, the Pension Suisse, Rome - and on the crossing meets a naval officer who keeps turning up. Susan Coolidge was Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, who nursed in the Civil War and knew Europe herself, and the book reads as a travel diary with a love story tucked into it. The invalid years are behind, and the tone changes with them. Fifty-six plates from Inness and Bierstadt and their contemporaries follow the same route, from Alpine lakes and Cumberland crags to the coach roads of an older Europe.
