We arrived there about four, and Menzies-Legh pitched on an exceedingly ugly camping ground on a slope just outside the city, with villa residences so near that their inhabitants could observe us, if they had telescopes, from their windows. It was a field from which the corn had been cut, and the hard straw remaining hurt one’s weary feet; nor had it any advantages that I could see, though the others spoke of the view. This, if you please, consisted of the roofs of the houses in the town and a cathedral rising from their midst in a network of scaffolding. I pointed this out to them as they stood staring, but Menzies-Legh was quite unshaken in his determination to stay just on that spot, in spite of there being a railway line running along the bottom of the field and a station with all its noises within a stone’s throw. I thought it odd to have come to a town at all, for till then the party had been unanimous in its desire to avoid even villages, but on my remarking on this they murmured something about the cathedral, as though the building below, or rather the mass of scaffolding, were enough to excuse the most inconsistent conduct. The heat of that shadeless stubblefield was indescribable. It did not possess a tree. At the bottom was, as I have said, the railway. At the top, just above where we were, a market garden, a thing of vegetables, whose aim is to have as few shadows as possible. Languidly the party made preparations for settling down. Languidly and after a long delay Menzies-Legh dragged out the stew-pot. In spite of the heat I was as hungry as a man ought to be who, at four o’clock, has not yet dined, and as I watched the drooping caravaners listlessly preparing the potatoes and cabbages and boiled bacon that I now knew so very thoroughly, this having been our meal (except once or twice when we had chickens, or, in extremity, underdone sausages) since the beginning of the tour, a brilliant thought illuminated the gloom of my brain: Why not slip away unnoticed, and down in the town cause myself to be served in the dining-room of an hotel with freshly roasted meat and generous wine? Very cautiously I raised myself from the hard hot stubble. Casually I glanced at the view. With an air of preoccupation I went behind the Elsa, the first move toward freedom, as though to fetch some accessory of the meal from our larder. “Do you want anything, Otto?” asked my officious and tactless wife trotting after me--a thing she never does when I do want anything. Naturally I was a little snappish: but then if she had left me alone would I have snapped? Wives are great forcers of faults upon a man. So I snapped; and she departed, chidden.