Returning to the farmhouse he perceived an old man who was warming himself upon a bench in the sun and dipping soup from a pot with a wooden spoon. With this old man he entered upon an interminable conversation which bored me, but which ended in some questions as to the pavilion. “It is good for nothing but firewood,” said the peasant. “There were people in it formerly,” insinuated grandfather. “Formerly--a good many years ago.” Grandfather appeared to hesitate as to continuing the conversation, but then resumed: “Yes--a good many years ago. But you and I were not born to-day. Tell me, don’t you remember a lady?” I at once thought of the lady in white with the cherries in her hat, and I summed up her figure in that clearing, at the door of the pavilion. My imagination was already at work upon this new theme. “Oh,” said the old man, before swallowing the spoonful that he held in his hand--“as for women, I despise them.” A gleam of rage shot across grandfather’s eyes, and I thought he was going to overset the old man and his pot. He at once cut short the conversation without another word. But as he turned away he took me to witness the beauty of the place. “All the same, it’s sweet and wild here. The trees have hardly changed. They are all that is left.” I never learned the adventure of the pavilion. But one day when we were passing the colonel’s tottering château another memory, less direct no doubt, awoke in his mind and without preparation he began: “They called her the beautiful Alixe.” “Who, grandfather?” “She lived there. It was under the Empire.” “You saw her, grandfather?” “Oh, I; no! That’s too long ago. I am speaking of the first Emperor. Those who had seen her were old when I was young. Those who had seen her were bursting with pride merely at mentioning her name.” These brief evocations of the past threw for me a lovely veil of romance over our walks, which had “_happened_” like history. He never said more about either, as I expected him to do. He never supposed that I was watching his slightest words, and exaggerating their importance. Save the white lady with the cherries in her hat, who perhaps resembled, who doubtless resembled, some far-away picture of his past, he greeted women the most frankly in the world and never made any remark about them. When, several years later, one evening at school, I read the famous passage of the Iliad about the old men of Troy being disposed to forgive Helen because of her beauty, like that of the immortal goddesses, while my comrades were dozing over their Homer, I was seeing myself once more at my grandfather’s side on the road by which the lady in white came to us. And ever since I have called that unknown one Helen.