still, was indeed more than ever upon him when, toward six o'clock he
found himself amicably engaged with a stout white-capped deep-voiced
woman at the door of the auberge of the biggest village, a village that
affected him as a thing of whiteness, blueness and crookedness, set in
coppery green, and that had the river flowing behind or before it--one
couldn't say which; at the bottom, in particular, of the inn-garden. He
had had other adventures before this; had kept along the height, after
shaking off slumber; had admired, had almost coveted, another small old
church, all steep roof and dim slate-colour without and all whitewash
and paper flowers within; had lost his way and had found it again; had
conversed with rustics who struck him perhaps a little more as men of
the world than he had expected; had acquired at a bound a fearless
facility in French; had had, as the afternoon waned, a watery bock, all
pale and Parisian, in the cafe of the furthest village, which was not
the biggest; and had meanwhile not once overstepped the oblong gilt
frame. The frame had drawn itself out for him, as much as you please;
but that was just his luck. He had finally come down again to the
valley, to keep within touch of stations and trains, turning his face
to the quarter from which he had started; and thus it was that he had
at last pulled up before the hostess of the Cheval Blanc, who met him,
with a rough readiness that was like the clatter of sabots over stones,
on their common ground of a cotelette de veau a l'oseille and a
subsequent lift. He had walked many miles and didn't know he was
tired; but he still knew he was amused, and even that, though he had
been alone all day, he had never yet so struck himself as engaged with
others and in midstream of his drama. It might have passed for
finished his drama, with its catastrophe all but reached: it had,
however, none the less been vivid again for him as he thus gave it its
fuller chance. He had only had to be at last well out of it to feel
it, oddly enough, still going on.

For this had been all day at bottom the spell of the picture--that it
was essentially more than anything else a scene and a stage, that the
very air of the play was in the rustle of the willows and the tone of
the sky. The play and the characters had, without his knowing it till
now, peopled all his space for him, and it seemed somehow quite happy
that they should offer themselves, in the conditions so suppl