She thought, sometimes, that, after all, this was the happiest time of her life — the honeymoon¹, as people called it. To taste the full sweetness of it, it would have been necessary doubtless to fly to those lands with sonorous² names where the days after marriage are full of laziness most suave³. In post chaises behind blue silken curtains to ride slowly up steep road, listening to the song of the postilion re-echoed by the mountains, along with the bells of goats and the muffled⁴ sound of a waterfall; at sunset on the shores of gulfs to breathe in the perfume of lemon trees; then in the evening on the villa-terraces above, hand in hand to look at the stars, making plans for the future. It seemed to her that certain places on earth must bring happiness, as a plant peculiar⁶ to the soil, and that cannot thrive elsewhere. Why could not she lean over balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy⁷ in a Scotch⁸ cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet⁹ coat with long tails, and thin shoes, a pointed¹⁰ hat and frills? Perhaps she would have liked to confide¹¹ all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable¹² as the winds? Words failed her — the opportunity, the courage.

If Charles had but wished it, if he had guessed it, if his look had but once met her thought, it seemed to her that a sudden plenty would have gone out from her heart, as the fruit falls from a tree when shaken by a hand. But as the

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