We were seated on the terrace of a café at Rouen, a café on the quays. There was a long rank, three deep, of small marble tables, untenanted for the most part, sheltered by a bright red-and-white striped awning, and screened from the street by a hedge of oleanders in big green-painted tubs; so that one had a fine sense of cosiness and seclusion, of refreshing shade and coolness and repose. Beyond the oleanders, one was dimly conscious of hot sunshine, of the going and coming of people on the pavement, of the passing of carts and tram-cars in the grey road, and then of the river—the slate-coloured river, with its bridges and its puffing penny steamboats, its tall ships out of Glasgow or Copenhagen or Barcelona, its high green banks, farther away, where it wound into the country, and the pure sky above it. From all the interesting things the café provided, lucent-tinted syrups, fiery-hearted, aromatic cordials, Madame (with subtle feminine unexpectedness) had chosen a glass of milk. But the waiter had suggested orange-flower water, to give it savour; and now he brought the orange-flower water in a dark-blue bottle. It was partly, I daresay, the sight of the dark-blue bottle, but it was chiefly, perhaps, the smell of the orange-flower water, that suddenly, suddenly, whisked my thoughts far away from Rouen, far away from 1897, back ten, twenty, I would rather not count how many years back in the past, to my childhood, to Saint-Graal, and to my grandmother’s room in our old rambling house there. For my grandmother always kept a dark-blue bottle of orange-flower water in her closet, and the air of her room was always faintly sweet with the perfume of it.