She would have kissed me, I believe, there and then, only that we were now in the Boul' Miche. Her butterfly mind was entirely fascinated by the idea of new clothes and the country. The dress she was in, of some white material, though old enough perhaps, was new-washed and speckless, and graceful as a woman's dress of that day could be. Her hat, in my eyes, was daintier far than any hat I had seen in my life. Women, no doubt, could have picked holes in her poor attire, but no man. Just as she was that day I always see her now, beyond the fashions and the years, a figure garbed in the old, old fashion of spring, sweet as the perfume of lilac-branches and the songs of birds. At the Maison Dorée, 152 Boulevard St. Michel, within the space of an hour, and for the modest sum of a hundred francs or so, she bought—I do not know what; but the purchases filled four huge cardboard boxes covered with golden bees—the true luggage of a butterfly. When they were packed in and about a cabriolet I proposed food.
"I am too happy to eat," said Eloise; so, at the fruiterer's a little way down, I bought oranges and a great bunch of Bordighera violets, and we started.
It was late afternoon when we reached the little station at Evry. Ah, what a delightful journey that was, and what an extraordinary one! Happy as lovers, yet without a thought of love; good comrades, irresponsible as birds, laughing at everything and nothing; eating our oranges, and criticising the folk at the stations we passed.
"Listen!" said Eloise, as we stood on the platform of Evry and the train drew off into the sunlit distance. I listened. The wind was blowing in the trees by the station; from some field beyond the poplar trees came the faint and far-off bleating of lambs; behind and beyond these sweet yet trivial sounds lay the great silence of the country; the silence that encompasses the leagues of growing wheat, the pasture lands all gemmed with buttercups and cowslips, the blue, song-less rivers and the green, whispering rushes; the silence of spring, which is made up of a million voices unheard but guessed, and presided over by the skylark hanging in the sparkling blue, a star of song.
Men, I think, never knew the true beauty of the country till the railway, like a grimy magician, enabled them to stand at some little wayside station and, with the sounds of the city still ringing in their ears, to listen to the voices of the trees and the birds.
I sent a porter to the inn for a fly; and when it arrived, and the luggage was packed on and about it, we started.
CHAPTER XXII A POLITICAL RECEPTION
"It is like a cage," said Eloise, "with all the birds outside."