month in the country, was his correspondence with Madame de Châteauvieux,
who was at Etretât with her husband. She wrote her brother very lively,
characteristic accounts of the life there, filling her letters with
amusing sketches of the political or artistic celebrities with whom the
little Norman town swarms in the season.

After the third or fourth letter, however, Kendal began to look
restlessly at the Etretât postmark, to reflect that Marie had been there
a long time, and to wonder she was not already tired of such a public
sort of existence as the Etretât life. The bathing scenes, and the
fire-eating deputy, and the literary woman with a mission for the spread
of naturalism, became very flat to him. He was astonished that his sister
was not as anxious to start for Italy as he was to hear that she had done
so.

This temper of his was connected with the fact that after the first of
August he began to develop a curious impatience on the subject of the
daily post. At Old House Farm the post was taken as leisurely as
everything else; there was no regular delivery, and Kendal generally was
content to trust to the casual mercies of the butcher or baker for his
letters. But, after the date mentioned, it occurred to him that his
letters reached him with an abominable irregularity, and that it would do
his work no harm, but, on the contrary, much good, if he took a daily
constitutional in the direction of the post-office, which gave a touch of
official dignity to the wasp-filled precincts of a grocer's shop in the
village, some two miles off.

For some considerable number of days, however, his walks only furnished
him with food for reflection on the common disproportion of means to ends
in this life. His sister's persistence in sticking to the soil of France