"This is the shortest way," she said, as we came to the corner.
"Then we won't take it," said I.
When we reached the school-room door the damask roses were so much heightened in colour by exercise that I felt sure it would be useful to her to take a stroll like this every morning.
I have been low-spirited and listless lately. It is coffee, I think. I notice that I tell my secrets too easily when I am downhearted. There are inscriptions on our hearts never seen except at dead low-tide. And there is a woman's footstep on the sand at the side of my deepest ocean-buried inscription.
I am not going to say which I like best, the seashore or the mountains. The one where your place is, is the best for you; but this difference there is—you can domesticate mountains. The sea is feline. It licks your feet, its huge flanks purr very pleasantly for you; but it will crack your bones and eat you for all that, and wipe the crimsoned foam from its jaws as if nothing had happened. The mountains have a grand, stupid, lovable tranquillity; the sea has a fascinating, treacherous intelligence.
"If I thought I should ever see the Alps!" said the schoolmistress.
"Perhaps you might some time or other," I said.
"It is not very likely," she answered.
Tableau. Chamouni. Mont Blanc in full view. Figures in the foreground, two of them standing apart; one of them a gentleman—oh—ah—yes!—the other a lady, leaning on his shoulder. (The reader will understand this was an internal, private, subjective diorama, seen for one instant on the background of my own consciousness.)
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