But he had received it, was telling her that already she looked splendid, adding that when folks first came up they looked, seen beside those already there, just gass’ly. And for a moment the miscarriage was painful: to have appeared to drop even below his own level of undiscriminating hail-fellow-well-met. And for a fraction of a second as he stood before her in his correct garb she transformed him into an Englishman condemning her foolish grin—but there was his queer little American smile, that came to her from a whole continent and seemed to demand a larger face and form, a little smile dryly sweet, as misdirected as her own and during which they seemed to pour out in unison their independent appreciations and to recognise and greet in each other, in relation to the English world out here, fellow voyagers in a strange element. It healed her self-given stripes that were, she reflected as they went on together up the hill, needless, since to him, as an American, her greeting would seem neither naïve nor bourgeois. For all Americans are either undisturbedly naïve and bourgeois or in a state of merely having learned, via Europe, to be neither. And this man, now launched in speech revealed himself by the way he had of handling his statements, as so far very much what he had always been. Strange that it was always queer people, floating mysterious and intangible in an alien element who gathered up, not wanting them, testimonies that came from her of themselves. All the way back to the Alpenstock he pursued his monologue, information, and in an unbroken flow that by reason of its temperature, its innocence of either personal interest or benevolent intention, left her free to wander. There was in his narrow, unresonant voice only one shape of tone: a discouraged, argumentative rise and fall, very slight, almost on two adjacent notes, colourless; as of one speaking almost unawares at the bidding of an endless uniform perception. She heard it now as statement, now merely as sound and for a moment as the voice of a friend while after informing her that he had done the valley run and climb each morning and taken to-day a last turn to add yet one more layer to his week’s sunburn, he remarked that the long zig-zag was commonly deserted in the forenoon, folks mostly taking the other track, either to the rink, or further to the made run, or way beyond that to the ski-ing slopes. * * * * *