ied, with
a kind of inevitability. It was as if the conditions made them not
only inevitable, but so much more nearly natural and right as that they
were at least easier, pleasanter, to put up with. The conditions had
nowhere so asserted their difference from those of Woollett as they
appeared to him to assert it in the little court of the Cheval Blanc
while he arranged with his hostess for a comfortable climax. They were
few and simple, scant and humble, but they were THE THING, as he would
have called it, even to a greater degree than Madame de Vionnet's old
high salon where the ghost of the Empire walked. "The" thing was the
thing that implied the greatest number of other things of the sort he
had had to tackle; and it was queer of course, but so it was--the
implication here was complete. Not a single one of his observations
but somehow fell into a place in it; not a breath of the cooler evening
that wasn't somehow a syllable of the text. The text was simply, when
condensed, that in THESE places such things were, and that if it was in
them one elected to move about one had to make one's account with what
one lighted on. Meanwhile at all events it was enough that they did
affect one--so far as the village aspect was concerned--as whiteness,
crookedness and blueness set in coppery green; there being positively,
for that matter, an outer wall of the White Horse that was painted the
most improbable shade. That was part of the amusement--as if to show
that the fun was harmless; just as it was enough, further, that the
picture and the play seemed supremely to melt together in the good
woman's broad sketch of what she could do for her visitor's appetite.
He felt in short a confidence, and it was general, and it was all he
wanted to feel. It suffered no shock even on her mentioning that she
had in fact just laid the cloth for two persons who, unlike Monsieur,
had arrived by the river--in a boat of their own; who had asked her,
half an hour before, what she could do for them, and had then paddled
away to look at something a little further up--from which promenade
they would presently return. Monsieur might meanwhile, if he liked,
pass into the garden, such as it was, where she would serve him, should
he wish it--for there were tables and benches in plenty--a "bitter"
before his repast. Here she would also report to him on the possibility
of a conveyance to his station, and here at any rate he would have the
agrement of