wouldn't be so _funny_!" The author was indeed being very funny, and to
her thinking never so funny as when the narrative should have been most
engrossing. She was reading the account of the first ascent of an
aiguille in the Chamonix district, held by guides to be impossible and
conquered at last by a party of amateurs. In spite of its humor Sylvia
Thesiger was thrilled by it. She envied the three men who had taken part
in that ascent, envied them their courage, their comradeship, their
bivouacs in the open air beside glowing fires, on some high shelf of
rock above the snows. But most of all her imagination was touched by the
leader of that expedition, the man who sometimes alone, sometimes in
company, had made sixteen separate attacks upon that peak. He stared
from the pages of the volume--Gabriel Strood. Something of his great
reach of limb, of his activity, of his endurance, she was able to
realize. Moreover he had a particular blemish which gave to him a
particular interest in her eyes, for it would have deterred most men
altogether from his pursuit and it greatly hampered him. And yet in
spite of it, he had apparently for some seasons stood prominent in the
Alpine fraternity. Gabriel Strood was afflicted with a weakness in the
muscles of one thigh. Sylvia, according to her custom, began to picture
him, began to talk with him.

She wondered whether he was glad to have reached that summit, or whether
he was not on the whole rather sorry--sorry for having lost out of his
life a great and never-flagging interest. She looked through the
subsequent papers in the volume, but could find no further mention of his
name. She perplexed her fancies that morning. She speculated whether
having made this climb he had stopped and climbed no more; or whether he
might not get out of this very train on to the platform at Chamonix. But
as the train slowed down near to Annemasse, she remembered that the
exploit of which she had read had taken place more than twenty years ago.