The rain ceased as suddenly as it had begun. Anthony followed Annot to the porch. In the black spaces between the swiftly shifting clouds stars shone brilliantly; there was a faint drip from the trees. “He gets dreadfully depressed,” she interpreted her parent to him. “They wrangle all the time, exactly like a lot of schoolgirls. You have no idea of the bitterness, the jealousy, the contemptuous personalities in the Quarterlies. Really, they are as fanatical, as narrow, as the churches they ignore; they are quite like Presbyterian biologists and Catholic.” She sighed lightly. “They leave little for a youngish person to dream on. You are so superior--to ignore these centessimo affairs. Will you lean from the edge of your cloud and smile on a daughter of the earth in last year's dinner gown?” It was, he told himself, nonsense; yet he was moved to make no easy reply, something in her voice, illusive and wistful, made that impossible. “It's very good-looking,” he said impotently. “I'm glad you like it,” she told him simply. “M'sieur Paret fitted it himself while an anteroom full of women hated me. Oh, Anthony!” she exclaimed, “I'd love to wander with you down that brilliant street and through the Place Vendôme to the Seine. Better still--there's a little shop on the Via Cavour in Florence where they sell nothing but chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, the most heavenly cakes with black hearts and the most heavenly smell. And you'd like Spain, so fierce and hot against its dusty hills; and Cortina, green beneath its red mountains. We could get a porter and rucksacks, and walk--” she broke off, her hands pressed to her cheeks, a dawning dismay in her eyes. Then she was gone with a flutter of the skirt so carefully draped by M'sieur Paret. XLVI THE pictures of far places had stirred him but slightly: but to travel with Annot, to see anything with Annot, would offer continual amusement and surprise; her vigorous candor, her freedom from sham and petty considerations, enveloped the most commonplace perspectives in an atmosphere of high novelty. The trace of the vagabond, the detachment of the born dweller in tents, woven so picturesquely through his being, responded to her careless indifference to the tyranny of an established and timid scheme of existence. The following day her old, bright hardness had returned: she railed at him in French, in German, in Italian; she called him the solemn shover, Sir Anthony Absolute. And, holding Thomas Huxley's head directed toward him, recommended that resigned quadruped to emulate Anthony's austere and inflexible virtues. XLVII