When a New Yorker enters these places, though, their atmosphere is something deathlike to him. This merely vegetable growth, this life of the market-day and harvest, is deathly dull; and the place itself, as the phrase is, dead and alive. Possibly, our fabulous New Yorker visiting these places (if he visits them we must make him fabulous)--possibly, he may find things to admire in them; and the first day, he smokes his cigar on the battlements and gets along well enough. But towards the afternoon of the second--when he has had his morning drive, and his daughter has brought home her water-color--a terrible pall of silence, a stealthy, dread ennui comes over him. Ten to one but he flies by the night express to the nearest city with an evening paper--Marseilles, let us say, or Nice. And there, the daughter finds a band in the Promenade des Anglais, and her water-color remains unfinished. Vane was conscious of some of this; he had been long enough in New York for that. There was little here to interest an American. But still, it was pleasant; and life was made so simple an affair! and its outside was so sweet. How much more life promised to one in America! He did not distrust the promise; but a question is the first shade of doubt. And it really seemed, sometimes, as if, in ceasing to oppress one another, men had forgotten how to make each other happy. There is much beauty to be found in the South of France; with a something grander, more venerable, in these old moulds of life than one can expect among discordant sects and syncretisms. Vane enjoyed his summer to the full, and drank in the sunlight like a wine, forgetting that he was alone. And the people seemed so full and sound; with qualities of their own, and self-supporting lives; not characters that they assumed, or tried to make other people give them; nor with natures colorless, flavorless, save for some spirit of a poor ambition. I do not know what Vane had in his mind when this last thought so struggled for expression. He was not ill-natured, nor yet excessively captious. I suppose he was a little disappointed with his own country. At all events, he soon forgot America that summer. And, after all, he had seen but one unit, and there are more than fifty millions of them. Nor, perhaps, did he yet know Miss Thomas--the unit whom he had known best. XVIII. IN his life, Henry Vane had hitherto been prospecting. He had sunk several shafts deep into it, and had worked them honestly, but he had not had very much success. He had struck gold; but he had not struck much of anything else; and gold had now ceased to be of the first importance. The prime solution of the difficulty had only been postponed, in Brittany, that day five years before; it had not been met. The demands of a human life had never been liquidated; they had been funded, temporarily; and now the note was falling due. He, also, had been getting his daily bread, and had been delivered from evil.