Paul went to bed with his head full of the new enterprise, and the hundred and one inventions and ingenuities it suggested. He remembered having seen somewhere a room decorated with arched trellis-work painted a soft green, the arches hung with mauve wistaria made out of paper. Then his thoughts jostled against the problem of “baths.” Would English tourists of the richer sort expect and demand baths? Brent’s enthusiasm could not see itself rising above hip-baths and one can of water heated up in the corner of an outhouse. Fuel—like bedrooms—was going to be precious, and Paul went to sleep thinking of that particular bedroom and Manon’s simple solution of the difficulty.
“A good solution, too,” said Brent; “but I’ll stick out till I have finished the house.”
Durand’s De Dion was with them early, but not so early that Manon had not been able to help Paul finish the canvas ceiling of the kitchen. She was below in the cellar, dressing, while Brent loaded the valuables into the car.
“Any news of Louis Blanc?”
“Nothing,” said Durand. “By the way, do you know all the wells in Beaucourt?”
“No.”
“Then I will send old Prosper Cordonnier over with my sanitary expert; he knows them all.”
“You are having all the water tested?”
“We should look fools if it turned out bad, hey? Hallo—now, voilà le printemps!”
Paul turned and beheld the miracle of a French working woman in her Sunday clothes. It was not that he had never seen Manon before in that little black chapeau, black velour costume, and those neat suède high-heeled shoes. He could remember her going to church in those same clothes when he was billeted in Beaucourt during the war, but now they seemed different. They had a more personal and a more intimate meaning for him. He was aware of her small feet, of the quiet, sleek chicness of her clothes, of the roguish sedateness of that little hat. His thoughts went back fifteen years. He was thinking of a certain fair-haired girl with a razor-edged nose and mouth, coming out of the back gate of a big house, and wearing a blue plush hat covered with red cherries, an electric blue dress and the yellowest of yellow boots.