“They’re better than anything you’ve seen yet. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful in the world. It’s a little bit like what we saw yesterday and today, only a hundred times more magnificent. Mountains and valleys and woods and streams. You take a trail that runs half-way up the wall of the world. On one side you can look up through the pines to the snow; on the other side you look down into a green valley with cattle grazing and a torrent racing at the bottom. The air’s full of the scent of wild flowers and the tinkle of cow-bells. When you first come to it you feel you must just sit and look at it all day, taking it into your soul.”
Belinda listened to the murmur of insects in the grass, and everything she had seen that day passed before her in a pageant. At the end she saw the picture that Simon had painted for her. Young men and girls, sun-bronzed and care-free, swung along that trail half-way up the wall of the world, singing. They ate and slept and were happy around camp-fires like this. “What a lot of useless desires we clutter up our lives with,” she thought, “and never know how unimportant they were until they have been almost forgotten! What a mess of stupid formulas and trivialities!” She lay on her back and stared up into the overarching fretwork of leaves. There was still something else to be said: it hurt her, but a new pride demanded it.
“I’m sorry I slapped you and wasted so many days,” she said. “I’d give anything in the world to have them over again.”
He smiled in the firelight.
“I’ll apologize for saying you’d ceased to be ornamental. It wasn’t true, of course, but I wanted to make you mad. There was only a week, and we had to get the quarreling over and done with. As a matter of fact, you’re more decorative than you ever were before.”
He was so calm, so natural, that the effort of self-abasement which might have been a wound in her new peace of mind became nothing at all in retrospect. For that moment his unimpassioned understanding and wisdom seemed so godlike that she felt small — not uncomfortably and shamefacedly, but like a child.
“You’ve done so much for me,” she said, “and yet I know nothing about you.”
He laughed.
“I’m just a rogue and a vagabond. Sometimes I’m enjoying a rest like this, sometimes I’m in much worse trouble. You’d only know me from my unlawful exploits, if you read about things like that. I throw my weight about and have no end of fun. Sometimes I steal.” He turned his blue eyes on her, and they danced. “I stole your bag in Munich.”
She was too astounded even to gasp. “You stole my bag?”