ed to her that she must fly from the life
which was choking her. It was all so petty and so small. People went
about sneaking into other people's homes like detectives; they turned
yellow and grew scrofulous from too much salt pork, green tea, native
tobacco, and the heat of feather beds. The making of a rag carpet was an
event, the birth of a baby every year till the woman was forty-five was
a commonplace; but the exit of a youth to a seminary to become a priest,
or the entrance to the novitiate of a young girl, were matters as
important as a battle to Napoleon the Great.

How had she gone through it all so long, she asked herself? The presence
of Jean Jacques had become almost unbearable when, the day done, he
retired to the feather bed which she loathed, though he would have
looked upon discarding it like the abdication of his social position.
A feather bed was a sign of social position; it was as much the dais
to his honour as is the woolsack to the Lord Chancellor in the House of
Lords.

She was waiting for something. There was a restless, vagrant spirit
alive in her now. She had been so long inactive, tied by the leg,
with wings clipped; now her mind roamed into pleasant places of the
imagination where life had freedom, where she could renew the impulses
of youth. A true philosopher-a man of the world-would have known
for what she was waiting with that vague, disordered expectancy and
yearning; but there was no man of the world to watch and guide her this
fateful summer, when things began to go irretrievably wrong.

Then George Masson came. He was a man of the world in his way; he saw
and knew better than the philosopher of the Manor Cartier. He grasped
the situation with the mind of an artist in his own sphere, and with
the knowledge got by experience. Thus there had been the thing which the
Clerk of the Court saw from Mont Violet behind the Manor; and so it
was that as Jean Jacques helped Carmen down from the red wagon on their
return from Vilray, she gave him a smile which was meant to deceive;
for though given to him it was really given to another man in her mind's
eye. At sunset she gave it again to George Masson on the river-bank,
only warmer and brighter still, with eyes that were burning, with hands
that trembled, and with an agitated bosom more delicately ample than it
was on the day the Antoine was wrecked.

Neither of these two adventurers into a wild world of feeling noticed
that a man was sitting