 I've come to know through my awkward connexion with
Chad - was ever anything, by the way, more awkward? Be for me, please, with all
your admirable tact and trust, just whatever I may show you it's a present
pleasure to me to think you.« It had been a large indication to meet; but if she
hadn't met it what had she done, and how had their time together slipped along
so smoothly, mild but not slow, and melting, liquefying, into his happy illusion
of idleness? He could recognise on the other hand that he had probably not been
without reason, in his prior, his restricted state, for keeping an eye on his
liability to lapse from good faith.
    He really continued in the picture - that being for himself his situation -
all the rest of this rambling day; so that the charm was still, was indeed more
than ever upon him when, toward six o'clock, he found himself amicably engaged
with a stout white-capped deep-voiced woman at the door of the auberge of the
biggest village, a village that affected him as a thing of whiteness, blueness
and crookedness, set in coppery green, and that had the river flowing behind or
before it - one couldn't say which; at the bottom, in particular, of the
inn-garden. He had had other adventures before this; had kept along the height,
after shaking off slumber; had admired, had almost coveted, another small old
church, all steep roof and dim slate-colour without and all whitewash and paper
flowers within; had lost his way and had found it again; had conversed with
rustics who struck him perhaps a little more as men of the world than he had
expected; had acquired at a bound a fearless facility in French; had had, as the
afternoon waned, a watery bock, all pale and Parisian, in the café of the
furthest village, which was not the biggest; and had meanwhile not once
overstepped the oblong gilt frame. The frame had drawn itself out for him, as
much as you please; but that was just his luck. He had finally come down again
to the valley, to keep within touch of stations and trains, turning his face to
the quarter from which he had started; and thus it was that he had at last
pulled up before the hostess of the Cheval Blanc, who met him, with a rough
readiness that was like the clatter of sabots over stones, on their common
ground of a côtelette de veau à l'oseille
