George Eliot had never met a man like
you, poor thing, so she had to stick the real thing down to dogs."

Septimus reddened. "Dogs bark and keep one from sleeping," he said. "My
next-door neighbor at the Hotel Godet has two. An ugly man with a beard
comes and takes them out in a motor car. Do you know, I'm thinking of
growing a beard. I wonder how I should look in it?"

Emmy laughed and caught his sleeve. "Why won't you even let me tell you
what I think of you?"

"Wait till I've grown the beard, and then you can," said Septimus.

"That will be never," she retorted; "for if you grow a beard, you'll look a
horror, like a Prehistoric Man--and I sha'n't have anything to do with you.
So I'll never be able to tell you."

"It would be better so," said he.

They made many plans for settling down in some part of rural France or
Switzerland--they had the map of Europe to choose from--but Septimus's
vagueness and a disinclination for further adventure on the part of Emmy
kept them in Paris. The winter brightened into spring, and Paris, gay in
lilac and sunshine, held them in her charm. There were days when they
almost forgot, and became the light-hearted companions of the lame donkey
on Nunsmere Common.

A day on the Seine, for instance, in a steamboat, when the water was
miraculously turned to sparkling wine and the great masses of buildings
were bathed in amber and the domes of the Pantheon and the Invalides and
the cartouches and bosses of the Pont Alexandre III shone burnished gold.
There was Auteuil, with its little open-air restaurants, rustic trellis and
creepers, and its _friture_ of gudgeon and dusty salt and cutlery and great
yards of bread, which Emmy loved to break with Septimus, like Christmas
crackers. Then, afterwards, there was the winding Seine again, Robinson
Crusoe's Island in all its greenery, and St. Cloud with its terrace looking
over the valley to Paris wrapped in an amethyst haze, with here and there a
triumphant point of glory.

A day also in the woods of Bas Meudon, alone beneath the trees, when they
talked like children, and laughed over the luncheon basket which Madame
Bolivard had stuffed full of electrifying edibles; when they lay on their
backs and looked dreamily at the sky through the leaves, and listened to
the chirrup of insects awakening from winter and the strange cracklings and
tiny voices of springtide, and gave themselves up to the general vibration
of life which accompanies the work