Of course, before they got back to the villa, he had had a great
deal of desultory conversation with Bessie Alden.

The young Englishmen spent the whole of that day and the whole
of many successive days in what the French call the intimite
of their new friends. They agreed that it was extremely jolly,
that they had never known anything more agreeable.
It is not proposed to narrate minutely the incidents
of their sojourn on this charming shore; though if it were
convenient I might present a record of impressions nonetheless
delectable that they were not exhaustively analyzed.
Many of them still linger in the minds of our travelers,
attended by a train of harmonious images--images of brilliant
mornings on lawns and piazzas that overlooked the sea;
of innumerable pretty girls; of infinite lounging and talking
and laughing and flirting and lunching and dining; of universal
friendliness and frankness; of occasions on which they knew
everyone and everything and had an extraordinary sense of ease;
of drives and rides in the late afternoon over gleaming beaches,
on long sea roads, beneath a sky lighted up by marvelous sunsets;
of suppers, on the return, informal, irregular, agreeable;
of evenings at open windows or on the perpetual verandas,
in the summer starlight, above the warm Atlantic.
The young Englishmen were introduced to everybody,
entertained by everybody, intimate with everybody. At the end
of three days they had removed their luggage from the hotel
and had gone to stay with Mrs. Westgate--a step to which Percy
Beaumont at first offered some conscientious opposition.
I call his opposition conscientious, because it was founded upon
some talk that he had had, on the second day, with Bessie Alden.