It was in this same auberge that our landlady made this piteous supplication:  “Caricature each other on the walls, messieurs et mesdames, si vous voulez; make portrait busts of the bread and figurines of the potatoes, and decorate the plates in whatever style of art you please; but don’t, je vous en supplie, don’t blacken the table-cloths before they are three days old.”

Alas! this was eloquence lost; for, at that very dinner, conversation chancing to turn upon the subtile malignity of Fanny Matilda’s smiles, Fanny Matilda being there present, in less time than it takes to tell it twenty crayon smiles writhed and wriggled upon the spick-span cloth.

“Mon Dieu! mon Dieu!” moaned Madame.  “And only yesterday every handkerchief upon the line came in bearing the noses of messieurs et mesdames!”

Aloofly though the Deanite lives, he is not altogether an unsocial being.  Neither are his domestic habits always as invisible to the finite eye as he perhaps intends them to be.  Tent-life has scant privacy, and the circumscribed accommodation of the Dean leads to frequent “slopping over” into cloth annexes.

Opposite our windows a certain painter spent no inconsiderable time in the peak-roofed tent upon the grass-plot.  There the young foreign-looking wife, in scarlet birette and jaunty petticoats just touching high boot-tops, with long, flowing hair, as bright and effective as any pictured vivandiere, made tea and coffee over a petroleum-stove, laid the table, sat at her sewing, posed for her husband, received her callers, as charming a gypsy picture as ever brightened canvas.

For the very best of reasons, we were not ’cyclists, although in a country set with ’cycles as the fields with flowers or the sky with stars.

For reasons equally good, we were not boatists, although the watery way from Oxford to the sea flowed so near our door, and our village was one of the gayest head-quarters not only of the fresh-water navy, whose arms are flashing oars and whose oaths are of the universities, but equally that of regiments of painters, whose arms are sketching-umbrellas and easels and who swear not at all,—­or at least not to feminine hearing.

Our lodgings were among the artists in the region farther back from the river than that monopolized by the boating-people.  We were back among the sunny slopes and smiling meadows, the red-tiled farm-houses and dusky lanes, of the still primitive natives of the region, while the navy covered the shining river by day and overran the river-side hostelries by night.