dange_
for the coming autumn.... We, begged him, of course, not to allow us to
interfere with his business in the slightest degree. He thanked us a
thousand times.

"'But though we dine in the village, we will take our own wine with us,'
he said, 'a wine _surfin_--one of my wines--you shall see--'

"Then he showed us round his place--I forget how many hundreds of acres
of vines, and into the great building with the presses and pumps and
casks and the huge barrel they call the thunderbolt--and about seven
o'clock we walked back to Darbisson to dinner, carrying our wine with us.
I think the restaurant we dined in was the only one in the place, and our
gaillard of a host--he was a straight-backed, well-set-up chap, with
rather fine eyes--did us on the whole pretty well. His wine certainly was
good stuff, and set our tongues going....

"A moment ago I said a fellow like Rangon leads a restricted sort of life
in those parts. I saw this more clearly as dinner went on. We dined by an
open window, from which we could see the stream with the planks across it
where the women washed clothes during the day and assembled in the
evening for gossip. There were a dozen or so of them there as we dined,
laughing and chatting in low tones--they all seemed pretty--it was
quickly falling dusk--all the girls are pretty then, and are quite
conscious of it--_you_ know, Marsham. Behind them, at the end of the
street, one of these great cypress wind-screens showed black against the
sky, a ragged edge something like the line the needle draws on a rainfall
chart; and you could only tell whether they were men or women under the
plantains by their voices rippling and chattering and suddenly a deeper
note.... Once I heard a muffled scuffle and a sound like a kiss.... It
was then that Rangon's little trouble came out....

"It seemed that he didn't know any girls--wasn't allowed to know any
girls. The girls of the village were pretty enough, but you see how it
was--he'd a position to keep up--appearances to maintain--couldn't be
familiar during the year with the girls who gathered his grapes for him
in the autumn.... And as soon as Carroll gave him a chance, _he_ began to
ask _us_ questions, about England, English girls, the liberty they had,
and so on.

"Of course, we couldn't tell him much he hadn't heard already, but that
made no difference; he could stand any amount of that, our strapping
young _vigneron_; and he asked us questions by the doze