“Oh, do look, Zoe!  There’s greenery!  Now, is that all wheat?  Good lord, how pretty it is!”

“One can quite see that Madame doesn’t come from the country,” was the servant’s prim and tardy rejoinder.  “As for me, I knew the country only too well when I was with my dentist.  He had a house at Bougival.  No, it’s cold, too, this evening.  It’s damp in these parts.”

They were driving under the shadow of a wood, and Nana sniffed up the scent of the leaves as a young dog might.  All of a sudden at a turn of the road she caught sight of the corner of a house among the trees.  Perhaps it was there!  And with that she began a conversation with the driver, who continued shaking his head by way of saying no.  Then as they drove down the other side of the hill he contented himself by holding out his whip and muttering, “’Tis down there.”

She got up and stretched herself almost bodily out of the carriage door.

“Where is it?  Where is it?” she cried with pale cheeks, but as yet she saw nothing.

At last she caught sight of a bit of wall.  And then followed a succession of little cries and jumps, the ecstatic behavior of a woman overcome by a new and vivid sensation.

“I see it!  I see it, Zoe!  Look out at the other side.  Oh, there’s a terrace with brick ornaments on the roof!  And there’s a hothouse down there!  But the place is immense.  Oh, how happy I am!  Do look, Zoe!  Now, do look!”

The carriage had by this time pulled up before the park gates.  A side door was opened, and the gardener, a tall, dry fellow, made his appearance, cap in hand.  Nana made an effort to regain her dignity, for the driver seemed now to be suppressing a laugh behind his dry, speechless lips.  She refrained from setting off at a run and listened to the gardener, who was a very talkative fellow.  He begged Madame to excuse the disorder in which she found everything, seeing that he had only received Madame’s letter that very morning.  But despite all his efforts, she flew off at a tangent and walked so quickly that Zoe could scarcely follow her.  At the end of the avenue she paused for a moment in order to take the house in at a glance.  It was a great pavilion-like building in the Italian manner, and it was flanked by a smaller construction, which a rich Englishman, after two years’ residence in Naples, had caused to be erected and had forthwith become disgusted with.

“I’ll take Madame over the house,” said the gardener.

But she had outrun him entirely, and she shouted back that he was not to put himself out and that she would go over the house by herself.  She preferred doing that, she said.  And without removing her hat she dashed into the different rooms, calling to Zoe as she did so, shouting her impressions from one end of each corridor to the other and filling the empty house, which for long months had been uninhabited, with exclamations and bursts of laughter.  In