ts, but of
the Cluny and the Carnavalet. The Louvre even was not neglected, and as
they entered it first she recalled with still unaccustomed laughter his
reply to the proffered services of the guide. Indeed, there was much
laughter in their excursions: his native humour sprang from the same well
that held his seriousness. She was amazed at his ability to strip a sham
and leave it grotesquely naked; shams the risible aspect of which she had
never observed in spite of the familiarity four years had given her. Some
of his own countrymen and countrywomen afforded him the greatest
amusement in their efforts to carry off acquired European
"personalities," combinations of assumed indifference and effrontery, and
an accent the like of which was never heard before. But he was neither
bitter nor crude in his criticisms. He made her laugh, but he never made
her ashamed. His chief faculty seemed to be to give her the power to
behold, with astonishing clearness, objects and truths which had lain
before her eyes, and yet hidden. And she had not thought to acquire any
more truths.

The depth of his pleasure in the things he saw was likewise a revelation
to her. She was by no means a bad guide to the Louvre and the Luxembourg,
but the light in her which had come slowly flooded him with radiance at
the sight of a statue or a picture. He would stop with an exclamation and
stand gazing, self-forgetful, for incredible periods, and she would watch
him, filled with a curious sense of the limitations of an appreciation
she had thought complete. Where during his busy life had he got this
thing which others had sought in many voyages in vain?

Other excursions they made, and sometimes these absorbed a day. It was a
wonderful month, that Parisian September, which Honora, when she allowed
herself to think, felt that she had no right to. A month filled to the
brim with colour: the stone facades of the houses, which in certain
lights were what the French so aptly call bleuatre; the dense green
foliage of the horse-chestnut trees, the fantastic iron grills, the Arc
de Triomphe in the centre of its circle at sunset, the wide shaded
avenues radiating from it, the bewildering Champs Elysees, the blue
waters of the Seine and the graceful bridges spanning it, Notre Dame
against the sky. Their walks took them, too, into quainter, forgotten
regions where history was grim and half-effaced, and they speculated on
the France of other days.

They went fart