’I thought it was you who were treading on my dress purposely.  It won’t let me go.  Come and unfasten me.’

When she was released, they walked on again, side by side, very quietly.  Albine pretended that it was much more amusing to stroll along in this fashion, like steady grown-up folks.  They had just reached the meadows.  Far away, in front of them, stretched grassy expanses scarce broken here and there by the tender foliage of willows.  The grass looked soft and downy, like velvet.  It was a deep green, subsiding in the distance into lighter tints, and on the horizon assuming a bright yellow glow beneath the flaring sun.  The clumps of willows right over yonder seemed like pure gold, bathed in the tremulous brilliance of the sunshine.  Dancing dust tipped the blades of grass with quivering light, and as the gentle breezes swept over the free expanse, moire-like reflections appeared on the caressed and quivering herbage.  In the nearer fields a multitude of little white daisies, now in swarms, now straggling, and now in groups, like holiday makers at some public rejoicing, brightly peopled the dark grass.  Buttercups showed themselves, gay like little brass bells which the touch of a fly’s wing would set tinkling.  Here and there big lonely poppies raised fiery cups, and others, gathered together further away, spread out like vats purple with lees of wine.  Big cornflowers balanced aloft their light blue caps which looked as if they would fly away at every breath of air.  Then under foot there were patches of woolly feather-grass and fragrant meadow-sweet, sheets of fescue, dog’s-tail, creeping-bent, and meadow grass.  Sainfoin reared its long fine filaments; clover unfurled its clear green leaves, plantains brandished forests of spears, lucerne spread out in soft beds of green satin broidered with purple flowers.  And all these were seen, to right, to left, in front, everywhere, rolling over the level soil, showing like the mossy surface of a stagnant sea, asleep beneath the sky which ever seemed to expand.  Here and there, in the vast expanse, the vegetation was of a limpid blue, as though it reflected the colour of the heavens.

Albine and Serge stepped along over the meadow-lands, with the grass reaching to their knees.  It was like wading through a pool.  Now and then, indeed, they found themselves caught by a current in which a stream of bending stalks seemed to flow away between their legs.  Then there were placid-looking, slumbering lakes, basins of short grass, which scarcely reached their ankles.  As they walked along together, their joy found expression not in wild gambols, as in the orchard a week before, but rather in loitering, with their feet caught among the supple arms of the herbage, tasting as it were the caresses of a pure stream which calmed the exuberance of their youth.  Albine turned aside and slipped into a lofty patch of vegetation which reached to her chin.  Only her head appeared.  For a moment or two she stood there in silence.  Then she called to Serge:  ’Come here, it is just like a bath.  It is as if one had green water all over one.’