and let me breathe from
the far country of your adolescence the scent of those flowers of
spring among which I also used to wander, many years ago. Come with
the primrose, with the canon's beard, with the gold-cup; come with the
stone-crop, whereof are posies made, pledges of love, in the Balzacian
flora, come with that flower of the Resurrection morning, the Easter
daisy, come with the snowballs of the guelder-rose, which begin to
embalm with their fragrance the alleys of your great-aunt's garden ere
the last snows of Lent are melted from its soil. Come with the glorious
silken raiment of the lily, apparel fit for Solomon, and with the
many-coloured enamel of the pansies, but come, above all, with the
spring breeze, still cooled by the last frosts of wirier, wafting apart,
for the two butterflies' sake, that have waited outside all morning, the
closed portals of the first Jerusalem rose."

The question was raised at home whether, all things considered, I ought
still to be sent to dine with M. Legrandin. But my grandmother refused
to believe that he could have been impolite.

"You admit yourself that he appears at church there, quite simply
dressed, and all that; he hardly looks like a man of fashion." She added
that; in any event, even if, at the worst, he had been intentionally
rude, it was far better for us to pretend that we had noticed nothing.
And indeed my father himself, though more annoyed than any of us by the
attitude which Legrandin had adopted, may still have held in reserve a
final uncertainty as to its true meaning. It was like every attitude
or action which reveals a man's deep and hidden character; they bear
no relation to what he has previously said, and we cannot confirm our
suspicions by the culprit's evidence, for he will admit nothing; we are
reduced to the evidence of our own senses, and we ask ourselves, in the
face of this detached and incoherent fragment of recollection, whether
indeed our senses have not been the victims of a hallucination; with
the result that such attitudes, and these alone are of importance in
indicating character, are the most apt to leave us in perplexity.

I dined with Legrandin on the terrace of his house, by moonlight. "There
is a charming quality, is there not," he said to me, "in this silence;
for hearts that are wounded, as mine is, a novelist, whom you will read
in time to come, claims that there is no remedy but silence and shadow.
And see you this, my boy, the