They went through some tunnels, and when the train stopped at Sevres, had a glimpse of the Seine valley, where the blue mist made a patina over the soft pea-green of new leaves. Then the train came out on wide plains, full of the glaucous shimmer of young oats and the golden-green of fresh-sprinkled wheat fields, where the mist on the horizon was purplish. The train's shadow, blue, sped along beside them over the grass and fences. “How beautiful it is to go out of the city this way in the early morning!... Has your aunt a piano?” “Yes, a very old and tinkly one.” “It would be amusing to play you all I have done at the 'Queen of Sheba.' You say the most helpful things.” “It is that I am interested. I think you will do something some day.” Andrews shrugged his shoulders. They sat silent, their ears filled up by the jerking rhythm of wheels over rails, now and then looking at each other, almost furtively. Outside, fields and hedges and patches of blossom, and poplar trees faintly powdered with green, unrolled, like a scroll before them, behind the nicker of telegraph poles and the festooned wires on which the sun gave glints of red copper. Andrews discovered all at once that the coppery glint on the telegraph wires was the same as the glint in Genevieve's hair. “Berenike, Artemisia, Arsinoe,” the names lingered in his mind. So that as he looked out of the window at the long curves of the telegraph wires that seemed to rise and fall as they glided past, he could imagine her face, with its large, pale brown eyes and its small mouth and broad smooth forehead, suddenly stilled into the encaustic painting on the mummy case of some Alexandrian girl. “Tell me,” she said, “when did you begin to write music?” Andrews brushed the light, disordered hair off his forehead. “Why, I think I forgot to brush my hair this morning,” he said. “You see, I was so excited by the idea of coming to Chartres with you.” They laughed. “But my mother taught me to play the piano when I was very small,” he went on seriously. “She and I lived alone in an old house belonging to her family in Virginia. How different all that was from anything you have ever lived. It would not be possible in Europe to be as isolated as we were in Virginia.... Mother was very unhappy. She had led a dreadfully thwarted life... that unrelieved hopeless misery that only a woman can suffer. She used to tell me stories, and I used to make up little tunes about them, and about anything. The great success,” he laughed, “was, I remember, to a dandelion.... I can remember so well the way Mother pursed up her lips as she leaned over the writing desk.... She was very tall, and as it was dark in our old sitting room, had to lean far over to see.... She used to spend hours making beautiful copies of tunes I made up. My mother is the only person who has ever really had any importance in my life.... But I lack technical training terribly.”