“They shall be ordered at once.”

“I should also like,” she was looking out to sea, “to fill the hotel with people.”

“You flatter me,” he murmured.

“Perhaps,” she added, “it would be simpler to go away.”

“Simpler but impossible.”

“Why impossible?”

“The air is unique.  The Hotel Bungalow....”

“Please don’t,” she begged.

“Besides, for the first time in my life I am becoming discreet.”

“Ah, no, my friend, believe me.  It was merely that you, too, found it difficult to interrupt.”

“I did not want to interrupt.”

“There you had an advantage over me.  I was longing to bring your remarks about the sea to an untimely end.”

Her laugh was the most confidential thing in the world.  You felt as if she had given you an unlimited credit of intimacy.  He thought that she was looking ten years younger in her creamy crepe de Chine dress, with her big straw hat, which seemed to have conquered, without an effort, the perfection and simplicity of the absolute.

“What is it called?” he asked fingering it.

“Crepe surprise.”

He asked her to describe its lines, but she refused.

“Ne parlons pas robes,” she said.

They decided to go for a drive.

The cocher explained that he had lost his wife, but that “Lisette etait un tres bon petit cheval.”

They laughed—­at him, at one another, at the sun, at the sea, at everything.  He told her about the convolvuluses, and she said he ought to write a book.

He told her his name.

She puckered her forehead a little, and looked to him for help.

He explained rather stiffly that he had written three novels, a book of short sketches, a book of light verse, and a phantasy on Algeria.

She asked what they were called.  He told her.

She asked which was the best.

He said that “Sur les Rives” had the best things in it.  Perhaps it was less finished than some of the others, but it was on a bigger scale, the conception was more interesting.

She asked what the conception was.

He told her that it was about a woman who, out of affection for her husband, and deep intrinsical virtue, refuses to become the mistress of the man she passionately adores.  He goes away and she gives herself to the first person she meets with a look of him.  Her original great struggle has exhausted all her powers of resistance.

Madame Marly was silent.

“It is true,” she said, “for big things we have big resistances, and for little things little resistances.  And so we live our lives in small weak lapses—­not driven by hate or love, but by pique or boredom, lowering our flag to salute a pleasure boat, not a battleship.  Pouf,” she made a little gesture of disgust that he was beginning to know.  “We occupy the places that other people make for us.  We curl on their divans, we sprawl in their gutters, we sit proudly on the pedestals they put for us, we occupy their altars, and when we are alone, what happens to us?  We dissolve into air.”