He was quite excited.
"She is an uncommonly fresh and pretty girl. What eyes she has, and how
cross she looks. She must have been dreadfully worried, for she takes no
notice of anything."
"You will have all your trouble for nothing," I growled.
He began to lose his temper.
"I am not taking any trouble, my dear fellow. I think her an extremely
pretty woman, that is all. If one could only speak to her! But I don't
know how to begin. Cannot you give me an idea? Can't you guess who she
is?"
"Upon my word, I cannot. However, I should rather think she is some
strolling actress who is going to rejoin her company after a love
adventure."
He seemed quite upset, as if I had said something insulting.
"What makes you think that? On the contrary, I think she looks most
respectable."
"Just look at her bracelets," I said, "her earrings and her whole dress.
I should not be the least surprised if she were a dancer or a circus
rider, but most likely a dancer. Her whole style smacks very much of the
theater."
He evidently did not like the idea.
"She is much too young, I am sure; why, she is hardly twenty."
"Well," I replied, "there are many things which one can do before one is
twenty; dancing and reciting are among them, without counting another
little business which is, perhaps, her sole occupation."
"Take your seats for Nice, Vintimiglia," the guards and porters called
out.
We got in; our fellow passenger was eating an orange, and certainly she
did not do it elegantly. She had spread her pocket-handkerchief on her
knees, and the way in which she tore off the peel and opened her mouth
to put in the figs, and then spat the pips out of the window, showed
that her education had been decidedly vulgar.
She seemed, also, more put out than ever, and swallowed the fruit with
an exceedingly comic air of rage.
Paul devoured her with his eyes, and tried to attract her attention and
excite her curiosity, but in spite of his talk and of the manner in
which he brought in well-known names, she did not pay the least
attention to him.
After passing Fréjus and St. Raphael, the train passed through a
veritable garden, a paradise of roses, and groves of oranges and lemons
covered with fruit and flowers at the same time. That delightful coast
from Marseilles to Genoa is a kingdom of perfumes in a home of flowers.
June is the time to see it in all its beauty, when in every narrow
valley and on every slope, the most exquisite flowers are growing
luxuriantly. And the roses! fields, hedges, groves of roses. They climb
up the walls, blossom on the roofs, hang from the trees, peep out from
among the bushes; they are white, red, yellow, large and small, single,
with a simple self-colored dress, or full and heavy in brilliant
toilets.
Their continual breath makes the air heavy and relaxing, while the still
more penetrating odor of the orange blossoms sweetens the atmosphere
till it might almost be called the sugar-plum of the smell.
The shore, with its brown rocks, was bathed by the motionless
Mediterranean. The hot summer sun stretched like a fiery cloth over the
mountains, over the long expanses of sand, and over the hard, fixed blue
sea. The train went on, through the tunnels, along the slopes, above the
water, on straight, wall-like viaducts, and a soft, vague, saltish
smell, a smell of drying seaweed, mingled at times with the strong,
heavy perfume of the flowers.
But Paul neither saw, looked at, nor smelled anything, for our fellow
traveler engrossed all his attention.
When we got to Cannes, as he wished to speak to me he signed to me to
get out again, and as soon as I had done so he took me by the arm.
"Do you know, she is really charming. Just look at her eyes; and I never
saw anything like her hair."
"Don't excite yourself," I replied, "or else tackle her, if you have any
intentions that way. She does not look impregnable, I fancy, although
she appears to be a little bit grumpy."
"Why don't you speak to her?" he said.
"I don't know what to say, for I am always terribly stupid at first; I
can never make advances to a woman in the street. I follow them, go
round and round them, and quite closely to them, but I never know what
to say at first. I only once tried to enter into conversation with a
woman in that way. As I clearly saw that she was waiting for me to make
overtures, and as I felt bound to say something, I stammered out, 'I
hope you are quite well, madam?' She laughed in my face, and I made my
escape."
I promised Paul to do all I could to bring about a conversation, and
when we had taken our places again, I politely asked our neighbor:
"Have you any objection to the smell of tobacco, madam?"