When the frolicsome Parisienne began this piece of disrespectful childishness the two yachts had come abreast of each other. For a quarter of an hour they went side by side, cutting through the water, propelled only by the force of their robust lungs of steel, vomiting from their chimneys two straight, black columns, which scarcely curved in the calm air; and behind them stretched a furrow of glaucous green over the blue water, like a long and moving path of emerald fringed with silver, and on it rolled and pitched a sailboat manned by two young men, sporting in the wake of the steamers. On this wild race the deck was yet so motionless that the water did not tremble in the vases of Venetian glass placed on the table near a group of three women. The purple and saffron petals of the large roses slowly dropped upon the table. Beside the flowers, amid their perfume, Madame de Carlsberg was sitting. She had ungloved one of her beautiful hands to caress the bloom of the flowers, and she gazed, smiling and dreamily, from the _Dalilah_ to the luminous horizon, from her fellow-voyagers out to the vast sea, and at Hautefeuille standing, with Chésy, beside her, and turning to her incessantly. The breeze of the boat's motion revealed the slender form of the young man under his coat of navy blue and trousers of white flannel, and softly fluttered the supple red stuff of Baroness Ely's blouse and her broad tie of black _mousseline de soie_, matched with the large white and black squares of her skirt. The young man and the young woman both had in their eyes a feverish joy in living that harmonized with the radiance of the beautiful afternoon. How little his smile--the tender and ready smile of a lover who is loved--resembled the tired laughter that the jokes of Corancez had won from him two weeks before. And she, with the faint rose that tinged her cheeks, usually so pale, with her half-opened lips breathing in the healthful odor of the sea and the delicate perfume of the flowers, with her calm, clear brow--how little she resembled the Ely of the villa garden, defying, under the stars of the softest Southern night, the impassive beauty of nature. Seated near her loved one, how sweet nature now appeared--as sweet as the perfume of the roses that her fingers deflowered, as caressing as the soft breeze, as intoxicating as the free sky and water! How indulgent she felt for the little faults of her acquaintances, which she had condemned so bitterly the other night! For the eternal hesitations of Andryana Bonnacorsi, for the positivism of Florence Marsh, for the fast tone of Yvonne Chésy, she had now but a complacent half-smile. She forgot to be irritated at the naïve and comic importance which Chésy assumed on board the boat. In his blue yachting cap, his little body stiff and straight, he explained the reasons of the _Jenny's_ superiority over the _Dalilah_ and the _Albatross_, with the technical words he had caught from Marsh, and he gave the orders for tea:--