All the spring vegetables were at their crispest, most melting perfection, and the cherries from Anjou were like miniature apples of Hesperus.  Up and down the smaller streets went white-capped little old women, with baskets on their arms, covered with snowy linen, and they chanted musically on the first three notes of the scale, so that the sunny vault above them resounded to the cry, “De la creme, fromage a la creme!” The three Americans had enchanted expeditions to Chantilly, to Versailles again, called back from the past and the dead by the miracle of spring; to more distant formidable Coucy, grimly looking out over the smiling country at its foot, to Fontainebleau, even a two days’ dash into Touraine, to Blois, Amboise, Loches, jewels set in the green enamels of May ... and all the time Sylvia’s attempt to take the present and to let the future bring what it would, was pitched perforce in a higher and higher key,—­took a more violent effort to achieve.

She fell deeper than ever under Morrison’s spell, and yet the lack of Austin was like an ache to her.  She had said to herself, “I will not let myself think of him until his letter comes,” and she woke up in the night suddenly, seeing the fire and tenderness and yearning of his eyes, and stretching out her arms to him before she was awake.  And yet she had never tried so hard to divine every shade of Morrison’s fastidiousness and had never felt so supreme a satisfaction in knowing that she did.  There were strange, brief moments in her life now, when out of the warring complexity in her heart there rose the simple longing of a little girl to go to her mother, to feel those strong, unfailing arms about her.  She began to guess dimly, without thinking about it at all, that her mother knew some secret of life, of balance, that she did not.  And yet if her mother were at hand, she knew she could never explain to her—­how could she, when she did not know herself?—­what she was living through.  How long she had waited the moment when she would know!

One day towards the end of May, Morrison had come in for lunch, a delicately chosen, deceptively simple meal for which Yoshida had outdone himself.  There had been a savory mixture of sweetbreads and mushrooms in a smooth, rich, creamy sauce; green peas that had been on the vines at three o’clock that morning, and which still had the aroma of life in their delectable little balls; sparkling Saumur; butter with the fragrance of dew and clover in it; crisp, crusty rolls; artichokes in oil—­such a meal as no money can buy anywhere but in Paris in the spring, such a simple, simple meal as takes a great deal of money to buy even in Paris.

“It is an art to eat like this,” said Morrison, more than half seriously, after he had taken the first mouthful of the golden souffle which ended the meal.  “What a May we have had!  I have been thinking so often of Talleyrand’s saying that no one who had not lived before the French Revolution, under the old regime, could know how sweet life could be; and I’ve been thinking that we may live to say that about the end of this regime.  Such perfect, golden hours as it has for those who are able to seize them.  It is a debt we own the Spirit of Things to be grateful and to appreciate our opportunity.”