dinner of two courses." And she turned over her lamb-chops tenderly, as
to say that though a good cook could imagine better things, yet if you
could have but one course lamb-chops had much in their favour. "I shall
do them with breadcrumbs. Voila les femmes, monsieur!"

Longmore turned away with the feeling that women were indeed a
measureless mystery, and that it was hard to say in which of their forms
of perversity there was most merit. He walked back to Saint-Germain more
slowly than he had come, with less philosophic resignation to any event
and more of the urgent egotism of the passion pronounced by philosophers
the supremely selfish one. Now and then the episode of the happy young
painter and the charming woman who had given up a great many things for
him rose vividly in his mind and seemed to mock his moral unrest like
some obtrusive vision of unattainable bliss.

The landlady's gossip had cast no shadow on its brightness; her voice
seemed that of the vulgar chorus of the uninitiated, which stands always
ready with its gross prose rendering of the inspired passages of human
action. Was it possible a man could take THAT from a woman--take all
that lent lightness to that other woman's footstep and grace to her
surrender and not give her the absolute certainty of a devotion as
unalterable as the process of the sun? Was it possible that so clear a
harmony had the seeds of trouble, that the charm of so perfect union
could be broken by anything but death? Longmore felt an immense desire
to cry out a thousand times "No!" for it seemed to him at last that he
was somehow only a graver equivalent of the young lover and that
rustling Claudine was a lighter sketch of Madame de Mauves. The heat of
the sun, as he walked along, became oppressive, and when he re-entered
the forest he turned aside into the deepest shade he could find and
stretched himself on the mossy ground at the foot of a great beech. He