* * * * *

Now they saw the beauty before them, the vast plain, the mountains, the sea:  harmonious, serene, ripe with maturity, evocative of all the centuries of conscious life which had unrolled themselves there.

“It’s too beautiful to be real, isn’t it?” murmured the girl, “and now, the peaceful way I feel this minute, I don’t mind it’s being so old that it makes you feel a midge in the sunshine with only an hour or two of life before you.  What if you are, when it’s life as we feel it now, such a flood of it, every instant brimming with it?  Neale,” she turned to him with a sudden idea, “do you remember how Victor Hugo’s ‘Waterloo’ begins?”

“I should say not!” he returned promptly.  “You forget I got all the French I know in an American university.”

“Well, I went to college in America, myself!”

“I bet it wasn’t there you learned anything about Victor Hugo’s poetry,” he surmised skeptically.  “Well, how does it begin, anyhow, and what’s it got to do with us?”

The girl was as unamused as he at his certainty that it had something to do with them, or she would not have mentioned it.  She explained, “It’s not a famous line at all, nothing I ever heard anybody else admire.  We had to learn the poem by heart, when I was a little girl and went to school in Bayonne.  It starts out,

     ’Waterloo, Waterloo, morne plaine
     Comme une onde qui bout dans une urne trop pleine,’

And that second line always stuck in my head for the picture it made.  I could see it, so vividly, an urn boiling over with the great gush of water springing up in it.  It gave me a feeling, inside, a real physical feeling, I mean.  I wanted, oh so awfully, sometime to be so filled with some emotion, something great and fine, that I would be an urn too full, gushing up in a great flooding rush.  I could see the smooth, thick curl of the water surging up and out!”

She stopped to look at him and exclaim, “Why, you’re listening!  You’re interested.  Neale, I believe you are the only person in the world who can really pay attention to what somebody else says.  Everybody else just goes on thinking his own thoughts.”

He smiled at this fancy, and said, “Go on.”

“Well, I don’t know whether that feeling was already in me, waiting for something to express it, or whether that phrase in the poem started it.  But it was, for ever so long, the most important thing in the world to me.  I was about fourteen years old then, and of course, being a good deal with Catholics, I thought probably it was religious ecstasy that was going to be the great flood that would brim my cup full.  I used to go up the hill in Bayonne to the Cathedral every day and stay there for hours, trying to work up an ecstasy.  I managed nearly to faint away once or twice, which was something of course.  But I couldn’t feel that great tide I’d dreamed of.  And then, little by