It sometimes happened, too, that although she was incapable of feeling the beauty of a book which they were reading together, Sylvie understood better than Annette the power of certain pages, whose strange truth disconcerted her sister; for Sylvie knew life better than Annette did. And that is the Book of Books. Read it not who will. Everyone carries it in himself, written from the first to the last line. But to decipher it, one must be taught the language by the harsh master Experience. Sylvie had received lessons from him at an early age; she read fluently. Annette was beginning late. Slower to reach her, the lessons were to sink deeper. X The summer, this year, was excessively hot. By the middle of August the beautiful trees in the garden were already parched. In the close nights, Sylvie gasped for a passing breath of air. She had recuperated, but she was still wan and had little appetite. She was always a small eater, and if she could have had her way she would have frequently dined on nothing but an ice and fruit. But Annette kept watch over her, Annette grumbled. She was kept busy. Finally she decided on the trip to the mountains, that had been put off from week to week with the underlying hope that it might be avoided. She would have liked to keep her sister entirely to herself, all summer long. They repaired to a spot in the Grisons that Annette remembered from a former visit as having a good, simple hotel, in a pastoral, restful setting of old Switzerland. But a few years had transformed everything. The hotel was swarming with people. It was a city of pretentious palaces. Automobile roads cut through the fields; and, in the depths of the woods, one could hear the grinding of an electric tramway. Annette wished to flee. But they were tired from a night and day of suffocating travel; they did not know where to go, and all they asked was to lie stretched out without stirring. Where they were, even if everything else had changed, the air at least had preserved its crystalline purity; Sylvie sucked it in with her tongue, as though she were licking a Parisian ice from a glass cup while she stood beside the cart of an ambulatory merchant in the midst of a roaring street. They told themselves they would stay for a few days, until it became a little cooler. And then they got used to it. They discovered the charm of the place. It was a lively season. A tennis tournament was attracting the alert youth of three or four nations. There were informal dances, little plays. A buzzing swarm was loafing, flirting, showing off. Annette could have done without it; but Sylvie was frankly entertained, and the pleasure that she showed communicated itself to her sister. Both were high-spirited and had no reason to frown on the diversions of their age.