"Supposing she never wakes up!" Mary thought in alarm. "Supposing she's
gone to sleep like the Sleeping Beauty for thrillions of years? Only
she's not a Beauty," Mary added to herself in hopeful parenthesis.
However, soon after this Grandmamma did wake up, by which time Mary
herself had fallen asleep, and did not wake until the train reached
Lyon, where they got out and drove in the dusk along the banks first
of one river and then of another equally large until they reached
their hotel. Mary was sent with the chambermaid to have a bath before
she went to bed, and she had to walk along half a dozen dark, crooked
passages before she reached the bathroom, which was full of steam; the
bath itself was covered with a large sheet which floated about in the
water and kept bellying out on either side of Mary as she splashed
about. Her bath seemed to have caused much excitement in the hotel,
for all the time people kept coming to the door and shouting outside
to the chambermaid, who kept shouting back as excitedly while the
pipes on the wall groaned and bubbled and clashed until Mary was glad
when her bath was finished and the chambermaid, after wrapping her in
several towels, picked her up in her arms and carried her back through
the corridors, running fast and shouting to everybody she met to get
out of the way. That night Mary slept in an enormous four-poster with
heavy red curtains, and in the morning she went for a drive with her
grandmother first along the banks of the sluggish, dark green Saône
and then beside the sparkling azure Rhône. But what Mary liked best in
Lyon was the Cathedral on the top of a steep hill, which looked like
an elephant upside down with gilded legs and a golden trunk. After
_déjeuner_ they got into a most extraordinary train with carriages as
tall as houses where passengers sat on top without any roof over them,
in which they were puffed along until they reached their destination.
Châteaublanc was a small red-roofed town built upon the southern slopes
of a range of low hills that rose not much higher than the rolling
countryside of woodland, pasture, and vineyard, at the foot of which
a small tributary of the Saône ran its shallow course over a bed of
limestone. The ruins of the castle that gave its name to Châteaublanc
still stood like an acropolis above the town, the sight of which
compensated Mary for much, since this must really once upon a time
have been an enchanted castle without any need to pretend that it was
one. In fact, from the moment she alighted at the station Mary liked
Châteaublanc. She liked the wide main street, where the houses dreamed
in the sunlight behind green shutters and Gloire de Dijon roses, and
where in the middle of the front parterres beautiful purple and silver
globes shimmered with the movement of the small world therein reflected.
"Oh, Grandmamma, how beautiful they are!" she cried, clapping her hands.
"Yes, you're in roseland here," said Lady Flower.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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