e," he however after an instant made
answer; and abruptly, with a bow, he took his departure.

VII

He felt, when he found himself unobserved and outside, that he must
plunge into violent action, walk fast and far and defer the opportunity
for thought. He strode away into the forest, swinging his cane, throwing
back his head, casting his eyes into verdurous vistas and following the
road without a purpose. He felt immensely excited, but could have given
no straight name to his agitation. It was a joy as all increase of
freedom is joyous; something seemed to have been cleared out of his path
and his destiny to have rounded a cape and brought him into sight of an
open sea. But it was a pain in the degree in which his freedom somehow
resolved itself into the need of despising all mankind with a single
exception; and the fact that Madame de Mauves inhabited a planet
contaminated by the presence of the baser multitude kept elation from
seeming a pledge of ideal bliss.

There she was, at any rate, and circumstances now forced them to be
intimate. She had ceased to have what men call a secret for him, and
this fact itself brought with it a sort of rapture. He had no prevision
that he should "profit," in the vulgar sense, by the extraordinary
position into which they had been thrown; it might be but a cruel trick
of destiny to make hope a harsher mockery and renunciation a keener
suffering. But above all this rose the conviction that she could do
nothing that wouldn't quicken his attachment. It was this conviction
that gross accident--all odious in itself--would force the beauty of her
character into more perfect relief for him that made him stride along
as if he were celebrating a spiritual feast. He rambled at hazard for a
couple of hours, finding at last that he had left the forest behind him
and had wandered into an unfamiliar region. It was a perfectly rural
scene, and the still summer day gave it a charm for which its meagre
elements but half accounted.

He thought he had never seen anything so characteristically French;
all the French novels seemed to have described it, all the French
landscapists to have painted it. The fields and trees were of a cool
metallic green; the grass looked as if it might stain his trousers and
the foliage his hands. The clear light had a mild greyness, the sheen
of silver, not of gold, was in the work-a-day sun. A great red-roofed
high-stacked farmhouse, with whitewashed walls and a