into life. The features of her fashionable face, meanwhile, were
arranged with perfect composure; even in slumber she had preserved her
woman's instinct of orderly grace; not a sign was awry, not a window-
blind gave hint of rheumatic hinges, or of shattered vertebrae; all the
machinery was in order; the faintest pressure on the electrical button,
the button that connects this lady of the sea with the Paris Bourse and
the Boulevards, and how gayly, how agilely would this Trouville of the
villas and the beaches spring into life!

The listless glances of the few tailors and cobblers who, with
suspended thread, now looked after us, seemed dazed--as if they could
not believe in the reality of two early tourists. A woman's head, here
and there, leaned over to us from a high window; even these feminine
eyes, however, appeared to be glued with the long winter's lethargy of
dull sleep; they betrayed no edge of surprise or curiosity. The sun
alone, shining with spendthrift glory, flooding the narrow streets and
low houses with a late afternoon stream of color, was the sole
inhabitant who did not blink at us, bovinely, with dulled vision.

Half an hour later we were speeding along the roadway. Half an
hour--and Trouville might have been a thousand miles away. Inland, the
eye plunged over nests of clover, across the tops of the apple and
peach trees, frosted now with blossoms, to some farm interiors. The
familiar Normandy features could be quickly spelled out, one by one.

It was the milking-hour.

The fields were crowded with cattle and women; some of the cows were
standing immovable, and still others were slowly defiling, in
processional dignity, toward their homes. Broad-hipped, lean-busted