e
displayed before him in all their artless spontaneity. Luckily he, the
judge, had arrived; and he proposed to restore everything to its proper
place.

Meanwhile, they were drawing near the house at Asnieres. Frantz had
noticed at a distance a fanciful little turreted affair, glistening with
a new blue slate roof. It seemed to him to have been built expressly for
Sidonie, a fitting cage for that capricious, gaudy-plumaged bird.

It was a chalet with two stories, whose bright mirrors and pink-lined
curtains could be seen from the railway, shining resplendent at the far
end of a green lawn, where an enormous pewter ball was suspended.

The river was near at hand, still wearing its Parisian aspect, filled
with chains, bathing establishments, great barges, and multitudes
of little, skiffs, with a layer of coal dust on their pretentious,
freshly-painted names, tied to the pier and rocking to the slightest
motion of the water. From her windows Sidonie could see the restaurants
on the beach, silent through the week, but filled to overflowing on
Sunday with a motley, noisy crowd, whose shouts of laughter, mingled
with the dull splash of oars, came from both banks to meet in midstream
in that current of vague murmurs, shouts, calls, laughter, and singing
that floats without ceasing up and down the Seine on holidays for a
distance of ten miles.

During the week she saw shabbily-dressed idlers sauntering along the
shore, men in broad-brimmed straw hats and flannel shirts, women who sat
on the worn grass of the sloping bank, doing nothing, with the dreamy
eyes of a cow at pasture. All the peddlers, hand-organs, harpists;
travelling jugglers, stopped there as at a quarantine station. The quay
was crowded with them, and as they approached, the windows in the
little houses near by were always thrown open, disclosing white
dressing-jackets, half-buttoned, heads of dishevelled hair, and an
occasional pipe, all watching these paltry strolling shows, as if with
a sigh of regret for Paris, so near at hand. It was a hideous and
depressing sight.

The grass, which had hardly begun to grow, was already turning yellow
beneath the feet of the crowd. The dust was black; and yet, every
Thursday, the cocotte aristocracy passed through on the way to the
Casino, with a great show of rickety carriages and borrowed postilions.
All these things gave pleasure to that fanatical Parisian, Sidonie; and
then, too, in her childhood, she had heard a gr