color or sound.

"I really think I'm rather jealous of all these people," he told Stella.
"They always seem to be able to go on being excited, and everything that
happens to them they seem able to turn to account. Now, I can do nothing
with my experience. I seize it, I enjoy it for a very short time. I
begin to observe it with a warm interest, then to criticize, then to be
bored by it, and finally I forget it altogether and remain just as I was
before it occurred except that I never can seize the same sort of
experience again. Perhaps it's being with you. Perhaps you absorb all
the vitality."

Stella looked depressed by this suggestion.

"Let's go away and leave all these people," she proposed. "Let's go to
Compiegne together, and we'll see if you're depressed by me then. But if
you are, oh, Michael, I shan't know what to do! Only you won't be, if
we're in Compiegne. It was such a success last time. In a way, you know,
we really met each other there for the first time."

It was a relief to say farewell to Clarissa and her determination to
produce moderately good pictures, to Ayliffe and his morbid hopes, to
all that motley crowd, so pathetic and yet so completely self-satisfied.
It was pleasant to arrive in Compiegne and find that Madame Regnier's
house had not changed in three years, that the three old widows had not
suffered from time's now slow and kindly progress, that M. Regnier still
ate his food with the same noisy recklessness, that the front garden
blazed with just the same vermilion of the geranium flowers.

For a week they spent industrious days of music and reading, and long
mellow afternoons of provincial drowsiness that culminated in the simple
pleasures of cassis and billiards at night. Michael wrote a sheaf of
long letters to all his friends, among others to Lonsdale, who on
hearing that he was at Compiegne wrote immediately to Prince Raoul de
Castera-Verduzan, an Eton contemporary, and asked him to call upon
Michael. The young prince arrived one morning in a 70 h.p. car and by
his visit made M. Regnier the proudest bourgeois in France. Prince
Raoul, who was dressed, so Stella said, as brightly as it was possible
even for a prince to dress nowadays, insisted that Michael and his
sister must become temporary members of the Societe du Sport de
Compiegne. This proposal at first they were inclined to refuse, but M.
Regnier and Madame Regnier and the three old widows were all so highly
elated at the pros