“Doubtless you would have done so,” said the custodian of the red umbrella, “had you been Rousseau.”
She sat down with her French novel on the smaller half of the fragment of slate. She looked deliciously cool and trim in her green linen frock, embellished by a hat with a wide brim, which a Breton peasant woman had plaited for her the summer before last. It had a piece of blue crêpe twisted round it. Did she know that she was looking well, or had she really persuaded herself that she was wholly absorbed in high thoughts about nature?
“Or were you Wordsworth you would feel the same, possibly,” said the fair inhabitant of the green frock.
Pour encourager milor? Well, really, who can say? The emotions of a French novel, a red umbrella, and a green linen frock with a twist of blue crêpe are so complex. Nature is complex also. There was Gwydr straight before them with the sun dying upon his left shoulder. His lesser brethren were already veiled in shadow. The lake had the luster of a dark jewel; the sky was opal; and scarcely two hundred paces distant, behind that line of boulders, the great things of art were toward.
Although the wearer of the patent-leather boots with box-cloth uppers was neither Rousseau nor Wordsworth, he sat down gracefully upon the larger half of the slate, after dusting it carefully with a yellow silk handkerchief.
“Yes,” said he, “had I been Rousseau I should have sat here indubitably and have written about nature. But had I been Wordsworth I should have sat here and thought about nature. There is a difference.”
Jim’s mother agreed that there was.
“I wonder,” said she, “if nature holds an opinion about us? When one finds her like this one feels that she must be indifferent to everything.”
“That weird fellow Gautier might have agreed with you,” said Cheriton, “and, to my mind, he had a good head. ‘Ouf!’ he used to say, ‘nature reminds me of your Shakespeare. Every day she makes a new masterpiece. And then she says, Ouf! it doesn’t interest me, and she makes another.’”
“Heedless of its destiny!”