, who were walking down from Saas. She came swinging
and shining towards us, easy and strong. I worshipped her as she
approached.

"Gut Tag!" said Willersley, removing his hat.

"Morgen!" said the old man, saluting.

I stared stockishly at the girl, who passed with an indifferent face.

That sticks in my mind as a picture remains in a room, it has kept there
bright and fresh as a thing seen yesterday, for twenty years....

I flirted hesitatingly once or twice with comely serving girls, and was
a little ashamed lest Willersley should detect the keen interest I took
in them, and then as we came over the pass from Santa Maria Maggiore to
Cannobio, my secret preoccupation took me by surprise and flooded me and
broke down my pretences.

The women in that valley are very beautiful--women vary from valley
to valley in the Alps and are plain and squat here and divinities five
miles away--and as we came down we passed a group of five or six of them
resting by the wayside. Their burthens were beside them, and one like
Ceres held a reaping hook in her brown hand. She watched us approaching
and smiled faintly, her eyes at mine.

There was some greeting, and two of them laughed together.

We passed.

"Glorious girls they were," said Willersley, and suddenly an immense
sense of boredom enveloped me. I saw myself striding on down that
winding road, talking of politics and parties and bills of parliament
and all sorts of dessicated things. That road seemed to me to wind on
for ever down to dust and infinite dreariness. I knew it for a way of
death. Reality was behind us.

Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral. "I'm not so
sure," he said in a voice of intense discriminations, "after all, that
agricultural work isn't good for women."

"Damn agricultural work!" I said, and broke out into a vigorous cursing
of all I held dear. "Fettered things we are!" I cried. "I wonder why I
stand it!"

"Stand what?"

"Why don't I go back and make love to those girls and let the world and
you and everything go hang? Deep breasts and rounded limbs--and we poor
emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in us!..."

"I'm not quite sure, Remington," said Willersley, looking at me with
a deliberately quaint expression over his glasses, "that picturesque
scenery is altogether good for your morals."

That fever was still in my blood when we came to Locarno.

13

Along the hot and dusty lower road between