The train was now coming into Paris. The fortifications were levelled but grass had not grown. There were many cars standing on tracks—brown wooden restaurant-cars and brown wooden sleeping-cars that would go to Italy at five o’clock that night, if that train still left at five; the cars were marked Paris-Rome, and cars, with seats on the roofs, that went back and forth to the suburbs with, at certain hours, people in all the seats and on the roofs, if that were the way it were still done, and passing were the white walls and many windows of houses. Nothing had eaten any breakfast. “Americans make the best husbands,” the American lady said to my wife. I was getting down the bags. “American men are the only men in the world to marry.” “How long ago did you leave Vevey?” asked my wife. “Two years ago this fall. It’s her, you know, that I’m taking the canary to.” “Was the man your daughter was in love with a Swiss?” “Yes,” said the American lady. “He was from a very good family in Vevey. He was going to be an engineer. They met there in Vevey. They used to go on long walks together.” “I know Vevey,” said my wife. “We were there on our honeymoon.” “Were you really? That must have been lovely. I had no idea, of course, that she’d fall in love with him.” “It was a very lovely place,” said my wife. “Yes,” said the American lady. “Isn’t it lovely? Where did you stop there?” “We stayed at the Trois Couronnes,” said my wife. “It’s such a fine old hotel,” said the American lady. “Yes,” said my wife. “We had a very fine room and in the fall the country was lovely.” “Were you there in the fall?” “Yes,” said my wife. We were passing three cars that had been in a wreck. They were splintered open and the roofs sagged in. “Look,” I said. “There’s been a wreck.” The American lady looked and saw the last car. “I was afraid of just that all night,” she said. “I have terrific presentiments about things sometimes. I’ll never travel on a _rapide_ again at night. There must be other comfortable trains that don’t go so fast.” Then the train was in the dark of the Gare de Lyons, and then stopped and porters came up to the windows. I handed bags through the windows, and we were out on the dim longness of the platform, and the American lady put herself in charge of one of three men from Cook’s who said: “Just a moment, madame, and I’ll look for your name.” The porter brought a truck and piled on the baggage, and my wife said good-by and I said good-by to the American lady, whose name had been found by the man from Cook’s on a typewritten page in a sheaf of typewritten pages which he replaced in his pocket. We followed the porter with the truck down the long cement platform beside the train. At the end was a gate and a man took the tickets. We were returning to Paris to set up separate residences. AN ALPINE IDYLL