"Upon my word, I cannot. However, I should rather think she is some
strolling actress who is going to rejoin her company after a love
adventure."

He seemed quite upset, as if I had said something insulting.

"What makes you think that? On the contrary, I think she looks most
respectable."

"Just look at her bracelets," I said, "her earrings and her whole dress.
I should not be the least surprised if she were a dancer or a circus
rider, but most likely a dancer. Her whole style smacks very much of the
theatre."

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 elocution are among them."

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

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 pieces, and then spat the pips out of the window, showed that
her training 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 fruits 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 toilettes.

Their breath makes the air heavy and relaxing, and the still more
penetrating odor of the orange blossoms sweetens the atmosphere till it
might almost be called the refinement of odor.

The shore, with its brown rocks, was bathed by the motionless
Mediterranean. Th