Zoé went up, grumbling. On the roof she found her mistress leaning against the brickwork balustrade and gazing at the valley which spread out into the silence. The horizon was immeasurably wide, but it was now covered by masses of gray vapor, and a fierce wind was driving fine rain before it. Nana had to hold her hat on with both hands to keep it from being blown away while her petticoats streamed out behind her, flapping like a flag. “Not if I know it!” said Zoé, drawing her head in at once. “Madame will be blown away. What beastly weather!” Madame did not hear what she said. With her head over the balustrade she was gazing at the grounds beneath. They consisted of seven or eight acres of land enclosed within a wall. Then the view of the kitchen garden entirely engrossed her attention. She darted back, jostling the lady’s maid at the top of the stairs and bursting out: “It’s full of cabbages! Oh, such woppers! And lettuces and sorrel and onions and everything! Come along, make haste!” The rain was falling more heavily now, and she opened her white silk sunshade and ran down the garden walks. “Madame will catch cold,” cried Zoé, who had stayed quietly behind under the awning over the garden door. But Madame wanted to see things, and at each new discovery there was a burst of wonderment. “Zoé, here’s spinach! Do come. Oh, look at the artichokes! They are funny. So they grow in the ground, do they? Now, what can that be? I don’t know it. Do come, Zoé, perhaps you know.” The lady’s maid never budged an inch. Madame must really be raving mad. For now the rain was coming down in torrents, and the little white silk sunshade was already dark with it. Nor did it shelter Madame, whose skirts were wringing wet. But that didn’t put her out in the smallest degree, and in the pouring rain she visited the kitchen garden and the orchard, stopping in front of every fruit tree and bending over every bed of vegetables. Then she ran and looked down the well and lifted up a frame to see what was underneath it and was lost in the contemplation of a huge pumpkin. She wanted to go along every single garden walk and to take immediate possession of all the things she had been wont to dream of in the old days, when she was a slipshod work-girl on the Paris pavements. The rain redoubled, but she never heeded it and was only miserable at the thought that the daylight was fading. She could not see clearly now and touched things with her fingers to find out what they were. Suddenly in the twilight she caught sight of a bed of strawberries, and all that was childish in her awoke. “Strawberries! Strawberries! There are some here; I can feel them. A plate, Zoé! Come and pick strawberries.”