e stroke of half-past
twelve when her ladyship began to complain of the sharp wind, and say we
had better be getting back to St. Remy. She was cross, as usual when she
is hungry, and said that if I continued to go about "like a snail in a
dream" whenever she fetched me to carry her things on these short
expeditions, she would leave me in the hotel to mend her clothes;
whereupon I became actually servile in my ministrations. I brushed a
microscopic speck of dust off her gown; I pushed in a hairpin; I tucked
up a flying end of veil; I straightened her toque, and made myself
altogether indispensable; for the bare idea of being left behind was a
box on the ear. I could not endure such a punishment--and the front
seat would look so empty, so unfinished, without me!

As we went back down the steep hill from old Glanum, St. Remy appeared a
little oasis of spring in the midst of a winter which had come back for
something it had forgotten. All its surrounding orchards and gardens,
screened from the shrewish Mistral by the shoulders of the Alpilles, and
again by lines of tall cypress trees and netted, dry bamboos, had begun
to bloom richly like the earlier gardens on the Riviera. There was a
pinky-white haze of apple blossoms; and even the plane trees in the long
main street were hung with dainty, primrose-coloured spheres, like
little fairy lanterns. Not only did every man seem a possible Felibre,
but every girl was a beauty. Some of them wore a charming and becoming
head-dress, such as I never saw before, and the chauffeur said it was
the head-dress of the women of Arles, where we would go day after
to-morrow.

Impertinent chauffeurs or couriers would have been more out of place in
poetic St. Remy than the sensational Nostradamus himself; and there was
no trouble of that sort for me in lunching at the pleasant, quiet hotel.
Mr. Dane had bought a French translation of Mistral's "Memoires," and as
we ate, he and I alone together, he read me the incident of the
child-poet and his three wettings in quest of the adored water-flowers.
Nothing could be more beautiful than the wording of the exquisite
thoughts, yet I wished we could have seen those thoughts embodied in
Provencal, the language practically created by Mistral, as Italian was
by Dante and Petrarch, or German by Goethe.

Not far away lay Mas du Juge, described in the book, where he was born,
and Maillane, where he lives, and I longed to drive that way; but as the
Turnour