y a dancer. Her whole style smacks very much of the
theater."

He evidently did not like the idea.

"She is much too young, I am sure; why, she is hardly twenty."

"Well," I replied, "there are many things which one can do before one is
twenty; dancing and reciting are among them, without counting another
little business which is, perhaps, her sole occupation."

"Take your seats for Nice, Vintimiglia," the guards and porters called
out.

We got in; our fellow passenger was eating an orange, and certainly she
did not do it elegantly. She had spread her pocket-handkerchief on her
knees, and the way in which she tore off the peel and opened her mouth
to put in the figs, and then spat the pips out of the window, showed
that her education had been decidedly vulgar.

She seemed, also, more put out than ever, and swallowed the fruit with
an exceedingly comic air of rage.

Paul devoured her with his eyes, and tried to attract her attention and
excite her curiosity, but in spite of his talk and of the manner in
which he brought in well-known names, she did not pay the least
attention to him.

After passing Frejus and St. Raphael, the train passed through a
veritable garden, a paradise of roses, and groves of oranges and lemons
covered with fruit and flowers at the same time. That delightful coast
from Marseilles to Genoa is a kingdom of perfumes in a home of flowers.

June is the time to see it in all its beauty, when in every narrow
valley and on every slope, the most exquisite flowers are growing
luxuriantly. And the roses! fields, hedges, groves of roses. They climb
up the walls, blossom on the roofs, hang from the trees, peep out from
among the bushes; they are white, red, yellow, large and small, single,
with a simple self-colored dress, or full and heavy in brilliant
toilets.

Their continual breath makes the air heavy and relaxing, while the still
more penetrating odor of the orange blossoms sweetens the atmosphere
till it might almost be called the sugar-plum of the smell.

The shore, with its brown rocks, was bathed by the motionless
Mediterranean. The hot summer sun stretched like a fiery cloth over the
mountains, over the long expanses of sand, and over the hard, fixed blue
sea. The train went on, through the tunnels, along the slopes, above the
water, on straight, wall-like viaducts, and a soft, vague, saltish
smell, a smell of drying seaweed, mingled at times with the strong,
heavy perfume of the flowe