rs meet. And I think of those destinies which have been linked
with Rose's during the past fortnight, while I am still unable to obtain
a clear idea of any one of them from her involved and incoherent
accounts.

The house, which is in the old-fashioned style, has at the back a sort
of glass-covered balcony overhanging the garden of the house next door.
Here the boarders take their coffee after meals, while the proprietress,
a gentle, amiable creature, strives to establish some sort of intimacy
among them, to create an imaginary family out of these strangers who
have come from all parts of the world with varying objects and for
diverse reasons.

I know from experience the surprises latent in people like these. To
look at them, one would set them down as belonging to stereotyped
models: invalids, travellers, globe-trotters, runaways or students, as
the case may be. I call up figures from my own recollection and describe
them to Rose to encourage her to tell me her impressions. Stray
reminiscences marshal themselves, images rise before my eyes,
obliterating the things and people around me, and a vision appears over
which my memory plays like a reflection in a sheet of water. I see a
long house and its white-and-green front mirrored in a clear lake. A man
and a woman arrive there at the same time; and I tell Rose the story of
the two old wanderers:

"It was very curious. Imagine those two people unknown to each other,
leaving the same country at about the same age and making the same
journeys in opposite directions. When I met them, they were two
grey-haired, wizened figures, with the same short-sighted eyes blinking
behind the same kind of spectacles. It amused me from the first to look
at them as one and united beforehand, at a time when they were still
unacquainted. I watched them at the meals which brought them closer
together daily, as it were perusing each other with the pleasure of
finding themselves to be alike, as though they were two copies of the
same guide-book. In their equally commonplace minds, recollections took
the place of ideas. To them, life was a sort of long classification;
they recognised no other duty but that of taking notes and cataloguing.
I don't know if they saw some advantage one day in uniting for good, or
if they began at last to think that there are other roads to follow in
the world beside those which lead to lakes, cities, waterfalls and
mountains. At any rate, after a few weeks, they w