, it
would drift over to one bank only to return to the other, eternally
repeating its double journey. Thrust towards the bank, its stalk would
be straightened out, lengthened, strained almost to breaking-point until
the current again caught it, its green moorings swung back over their
anchorage and brought the unhappy plant to what might fitly be called
its starting-point, since it was fated not to rest there a moment before
moving off once again. I would still find it there, on one walk after
another, always in the same helpless state, suggesting certain victims
of neurasthenia, among whom my grandfather would have included my aunt
Leonie, who present without modification, year after year, the spectacle
of their odd and unaccountable habits, which they always imagine
themselves to be on the point of shaking off, but which they always
retain to the end; caught in the treadmill of their own maladies and
eccentricities, their futile endeavours to escape serve only to actuate
its mechanism, to keep in motion the clockwork of their strange,
ineluctable, fatal daily round. Such as these was the water-lily,
and also like one of those wretches whose peculiar torments, repeated
indefinitely throughout eternity, aroused the curiosity of Dante, who
would have inquired of them at greater length and in fuller detail from
the victims themselves, had not Virgil, striding on ahead, obliged him
to hasten after him at full speed, as I must hasten after my parents.

But farther on the current slackened, where the stream ran through a
property thrown open to the public by its owner, who had made a hobby of
aquatic gardening, so that the little ponds into which the Vivonne was
here diverted were aflower with water-lilies. As the banks at this
point were thickly wooded, the heavy shade of the trees gave the water a
background which was ordinarily dark green, although sometimes, when we
were coming home on a calm evening after a stormy afternoon, I have seen
in its depths a clear, crude blue that was almost violet, suggesting a
floor of Japanese cloisonne. Here and there, on the surface, floated,
blushing like a strawberry, the scarlet heart of a lily set in a ring of
white petals.

Beyond these the flowers were more frequent, but paler, less glossy,
more thickly seeded, more tightly folded, and disposed, by accident, in
festoons so graceful that I would fancy I saw floating upon the stream,
as though after the dreary stripping of the deco