The counter was stacked with wares from Wigmore Street. Even the tooth-brushes were those of the new shape devised in Cavendish Square. The chemist was a bald preoccupied man speaking English abruptly. She came away with a jar of Smith’s cream, her shopping done and the face of the clock sticking out above the watchmaker’s telling her it was nearly noon. The little clock on the church said a quarter past eleven and glancing back at the watchmaker’s, now in the rear, she saw the reverse dial of the outstanding clock marking half past eleven. And Switzerland was the land of watchmakers.... Her own watch said one o’clock, English time. Then it was noon. But this far world was not three minutes distance from the Alpenstock. There was still half-an-hour. The post-office was a sumptuous hall. Little tables stood about invitingly set with pens and ink. No railed counter; a wooden partition extending to the ceiling; a row of arched pigeon-holes, all closed. Like a railway booking-office on Sunday, between trains—blankly indifferent to the announcement of the presence of a customer made by the clumping of her boots upon the wooden floor. And when presently—having gone the round of the posters, brilliant against the white-washed walls, all so much brighter and so much less bright than reality, all resounding with a single deep charm, bringing assurance of possessing, in one journey and one locality, the being of the whole—she tapped at a little shutter, it flew up impatiently, revealing an affronted young man in a blue cotton overall, glaring reproachfully through spectacles. The stamps handed over, the little door shot back into place with a bang, as if cursing an intruder. The open spaces called for a first view before the sense of its being no longer morning should have robbed them of intensity. But where the street joined the roadway there was a little shop, full sunlight falling on its window, whose contents were a clustered delight and each separate thing more charming than its neighbour. Two women approaching along the road preceded by English voices distracted her, for a moment, with the strangeness of their headdress—a sort of cowl. In a moment they passed with dangling clinking skates, and her intention of getting a good view from behind was diverted back to the shop window, by “tourist-trap” interpolated in a tone meant to be inaudible, in the dissertation of the one holding forth in a voice not unlike Mrs. Harcourt’s, about a hotel “packed like a bee-hive and swarming with influenza.” It was true. The shop was full of Swiss brummagem. She fastened on it the more eagerly. Little expensive cheap things whose charm was beyond price. Small clumsy earthenware, appealingly dumpy, flower patterned upon a warm creamy background; painted wooden spoons. Little brooches and trinkets innumerable. Cow-bells. Some small thing for everybody and a problem solved at the cost of a few marks.