the cake stuck, a
conspicuous lump, in the peacock's conspicuous throat. For what seemed
hours we waited in tense agitation, torn between our desire to make sure
the lump would disappear and our fears of discovery before it did. But
the peacock was a gentleman in his cups and reeled away to swallow the
lump and, I hope, to sleep off his debauch, in some more secluded spot
where, if he were discovered, we should not be suspected.

There was another afternoon I wonder Harland did not make use of which,
had I been in a pedantic mood, I might have taken as an object-lesson in
the art and occupation of shocking the _bourgeois_. We had been tempted
and had yielded as unreservedly as the peacock, with the difference that
our temptation took the form of the sunshine and the convenience of the
train service at St. Lazare. No sane person with such sunshine
out-of-doors could stay shut up in the _Salon_ and a train was ready at
St. Lazare, whenever we chose to catch it, to carry us off to
Versailles. We were on our way at once after our midday breakfast.

Versailles was too beautiful on that beautiful day to ask anything of us
except to live in the beauty, to make it ours for the moment; too
beautiful to spare us time for bothering about those who had been there
before us; too beautiful to allow the guide-book's fine print and maps
and diagrams to blind our eyes to the one essential fact that the sun
was shining, that the trees were in the greenest growth of their
May-time, that the flowers were radiant with the fulfilment of spring
and the promise of summer. As a place full of history we must have known
it, had we never heard its name. History stared at us from the grey
palace walls, history waylaid us in the formal alleys, lurked in the
formal waters, haunted the formal gardens, overshadowed all the leafy
pleasant places. There is no getting very far from history at Versailles
no matter how hard one may try to. But we had no intention to let the
dead past blot out the new life rekindling--to give its chill to the
young spring day and its sadness to the foolish young people out for a
holiday--to wither the fresh beauty that makes it good just to be alive,
just to have eyes to see and freedom to use them.

I can write this now, but I would not have dared to say it then. Not
only I, but every one of us, would have been as ashamed to be caught
indulging in sentiment, or "bleating," as the _National Observer_. The
chances are we we