“Oh, I say,” she said, “do look at that party in the corner.  The old Major’s well away, and the girl’ll have a job to keep him in hand, I wonder where they’re from?  Rouen, perhaps; there was a car at the door.  What do you think of the girl?”

Peter glanced back.  “No better than she ought to be,” he said.

“No, I don’t suppose so, but they are gay, these French girls.  I don’t wonder men like them.  And they have a hard time.  I’d give them a leg up any day if I could.  I can’t, though, so if ever you get a chance do it for me, will you?”

Peter assented.  “Come on,” he said.  “Finish that glass if you think you can, and let’s get out.”

“Here’s the best, then, I’ve done.  What are we going to see?”

For a couple of hours they wandered round the old town, with its narrow streets and even fifteenth-century houses, whose backs actually leaned over the swift little river that ran all but under the place to the Seine.  They penetrated through an old mill to its back premises, and climbed precariously round the water-wheel to reach a little moss-grown platform from which the few remaining massive stones of the Norman wall and castle could still be seen.  The old abbey kept them a good while, Julie interested Peter enormously as they walked about its cool aisles, and tried to make out the legends of its ancient glass.  She had nothing of that curious kind of shyness most people have in a church, and that he would certainly have expected of her.  She joked and laughed a little in it—­at a queer row of mutilated statues packed into a kind of chapel to keep quiet out of the way till wanted, at the vivid red of the Red Sea engulfing Pharaoh and all his host—­but not in the least irreverently.  He recalled a saying of a book he had once read in which a Roman Catholic priest had defended the homeliness of an Italian congregation by saying that it was right for them to be at home in their Father’s House.  It was almost as if Julie were at home, yet he shrank from the inference.

She was entirely ignorant of everything, except perhaps, of a little biblical history, but she made a most interested audience.  Once he thought she was perhaps egging him on for his own pleasure, but when he grew more silent she urged him to explain.  “It’s ripping going round with somebody who knows something,” she said.  “Most of the men one meets know absolutely nothing.  They’re very jolly, but one gets tired.  I could listen to you for ages.”

Peter assured her that he was almost as ignorant as they, but she was shrewdly insistent.  “You read more, and you understand what you read,” she said.  “Most people don’t.  I know.”

They bought picture post-cards off a queer old woman in a peasant head-dress, and then came back to the river and sat under the shade of a line of great trees to wait for the tea the hotel had guaranteed them.  Julie now did all the talking—­of South Africa, of gay adventures in France and on the voyage, and of the men she had met.  She was as frank as possible, but Peter wondered how far he was getting to know the real girl.