The lamps were all lighted on the long bridge over the Garonne; the lights quivered and lengthened in the sleek broad ripples; other lights twinkled on the masts and in the rigging of the half-seen shipping, and but for the trams and the traffic all things were as they had been at our midnight arrival in Bordeaux. It was only 6.30 o’clock, but autumn was catching up to us even in the Médoc, robbing us daily of more and more light, and blunting our regret for a portmanteauful of soiled white skirts by impressing the melancholy fact that this year we should have no further need of them. We had said good-bye to the Médoc and its kind people, and our faces were turned for the bleak North. There were four large dark hours to be disposed of before the departure of the Paris train, and, as we stood in the blue electric glare of the station, the question of what we were going to do with ourselves rose solemnly and awfully before us. Shopping in the dark was intolerable, even if we had known one shop from another, and there had been anything we wanted to buy; the conventional resource of going to see a church was obviously out of the question; the rather unconventional one of going to see ‘_La Femme à Papa_’ at the big colonnaded theatre was tempting, but would either impose in the future an exhausting burden of secrecy upon us, or would finally overthrow whatever confidence our relations might still retain in our discretion. There remained dinner as an occupation, and, leaving the arid brilliance of the station, we prowled forth along the quays in search of a suitable restaurant. We were ready to endure much for the sake of interest or picturesqueness, but there is neither one nor the other to be found in a room with a sawdusted floor, a block tin bar, and a contiguous billiard-table; and these features discounted successively the charms of the restaurants of ‘The Antilles,’ ‘The Brazil,’ ‘The Spain and Portugal,’ the ‘Hôtel à la Renommée de l’Omelette,’ and the ‘Café au Bon Diable,’ outside all of whose flaring windows we paused and surveyed with exceeding disfavour the company within.