the Orrido of Traffiume and
Cannobio Willersley had developed his first blister. And partly because
of that and partly because there was a bag at the station that gave us
the refreshment of clean linen and partly because of the lazy lower air
into which we had come, we decided upon three or four days' sojourn in
the Empress Hotel.

We dined that night at a table-d'hote, and I found myself next to an
Englishwoman who began a conversation that was resumed presently in the
hotel lounge. She was a woman of perhaps thirty-three or thirty-four,
slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very abundant fair
golden hair, the wife of a petulant-looking heavy-faced man of perhaps
fifty-three, who smoked a cigar and dozed over his coffee and
presently went to bed. "He always goes to bed like that," she confided
startlingly. "He sleeps after all his meals. I never knew such a man to
sleep."

Then she returned to our talk, whatever it was.

We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries and the usual
topographical talk, and she had envied our pedestrian travel. "My
husband doesn't walk," she said. "His heart is weak and he cannot manage
the hills."

There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she conveyed
she liked me, and when presently Willersley drifted off to write
letters our talk sank at once to easy confidential undertones. I felt
enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people one has
never seen before and may never see again. I said I loved beautiful
scenery and all beautiful things, and the pointing note in my voice made
her laugh. She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as I can remember I
said she made them bold. "Blue they are," she remarked, smiling archly.
"I like blue eyes." Then I think we compared ages, and she said she was
the Woman of Thirty, "George Moore's Woman of Thirty."

I had not read George Moore at the time, but I pretended to understand.

That, I think, was our limit that evening. She went to bed, smiling
good-night quite prettily down the big staircase, and I and Willersley
went out to smoke in the garden. My head was full of her, and I found it
necessary to talk about her. So I made her a problem in sociology. "Who
the deuce are these people?" I said, "and how do they get a living? They
seem to have plenty of money. He strikes me as being--Willersley, what
is a drysalter? I think he's a retired drysalter."

Willersley theorised while I thought of the woman and