fierce tempestuous side of the great Romantic.  There were others when the homely, tender, domestic aspect of the country formed a sort of framework and accompaniment to the simpler patriarchal elements in the books which Kendal had about him.  Then, when the pages on Victor Hugo were written, those already printed on Chateaubriand began to dissatisfy him, and he steeped himself once more in the rolling artificial harmonies, the mingled beauty and falsity of one of the most wonderful of styles, that he might draw from it its secrets and say a last just word about it.

He knew a few families in the neighbourhood, but he kept away from them, and almost his only connection with the outer world, during his first month in the country, was his correspondence with Madame de Chateauvieux, who was at Etretat with her husband.  She wrote her brother very lively, characteristic accounts of the life there, filling her letters with amusing sketches of the political or artistic celebrities with whom the little Norman town swarms in the season.

After the third or fourth letter, however, Kendal began to look restlessly at the Etretat postmark, to reflect that Marie had been there a long time, and to wonder she was not already tired of such a public sort of existence as the Etretat life.  The bathing scenes, and the fire-eating deputy, and the literary woman with a mission for the spread of naturalism, became very flat to him.  He was astonished that his sister was not as anxious to start for Italy as he was to hear that she had done so.

This temper of his was connected with the fact that after the first of August he began to develop a curious impatience on the subject of the daily post.  At Old House Farm the post was taken as leisurely as everything else; there was no regular delivery, and Kendal generally was content to trust to the casual mercies of the butcher or baker for his letters.  But, after the date mentioned, it occurred to him that his letters reached him with an abominable irregularity, and that it would do his work no harm, but, on the contrary, much good, if he took a daily constitutional in the direction of the post-office, which gave a touch of official dignity to the wasp-filled precincts of a grocer’s shop in the village, some two miles off.

For some considerable number of days, however, his walks only furnished him with food for reflection on the common disproportion of means to ends in this life.  His sister’s persistence in sticking to the soil of France began to seem to him extraordinary!  However, at last, the monotony of the Etretat postmarks was broken by a postcard from Lyons.  ’We are here for the night on some business of Paul’s; to-morrow we hope to be at Turin, and two or three days later at Venice.  By the way, where will the Brethertons be?  I must trust to my native wits, I suppose, when I get there.  She is not the sort of light to be hidden under a bushel.’