The weather was so magnificent that Renée felt ashamed of her closed brougham and her costume of flea-tinted silk. She drew back a little, and, with the windows open, looked at this flow of light stretching over the water and the verdure. At the bends of the avenues she perceived the line of wheels revolving like golden stars amid a long train of blinding gleams. The varnished panels, the flashing steel and brass mountings, the bright colours of the dresses passed on, at the even trot of the horses, and set against the background of the wood a long moving bar, a ray fallen from the sky, stretching out and following the bends of the roadway. And in this ray, as the young woman blinked her eyes, she saw every now and then the light chignon of a woman, the black back of a footman, the white mane of a horse, stand out. The arched parasols of watered silk shone like moons of metal. Then, in presence of this broad daylight, this expanse of sunshine, Renée thought of the fine dust of twilight which she had seen one evening falling on the tawny foliage. Maxime had been with her. It was at the period when her desires for that child were dawning in her. And she again saw the lawns dampened by the evening air, the darkened underwood, the deserted pathways. The line of vehicles had gone by with a sad sound past the unoccupied chairs, whilst now the rumble of the wheels, the trot of the horses, resounded with the joyfulness of a flourish of trumpets. Then the recollection of all her drives in the Bois returned to her. She had lived there. Maxime had grown up there, at her side, on the cushion of her carriage. It had been their garden. Rain had surprised them there, sunshine had brought them back, the fall of night had not always driven them away. They had been there in every kind of weather, they had there tasted the worries and the joy of their life. Amid the emptiness of her being, the melancholy imparted by Celeste's departure, these memories gave Renée bitter joy. Her heart said: "Never again! never again!" and she was like frozen when she evoked the image of the winter landscape, the congealed, dull-tinted lake on which they had skated; the sky then was of a sooty colour, the snow had set white lace on the trees, the wind had thrown fine sand in their eyes and on their lips.