“She is an uncommonly fresh and pretty girl.  What eyes she has, and how cross she looks.  She must have been dreadfully worried, for she takes no notice of anything.”

“You will have all your trouble for nothing,” I growled.

He began to lose his temper.

“I am not taking any trouble, my dear fellow.  I think her an extremely pretty woman, that is all.  If one could only speak to her!  But I don’t know how to begin.  Cannot you give me an idea?  Can’t you guess who she is?”

“Upon my word, I cannot.  However, I should rather think she is some strolling actress who is going to rejoin her company after a love adventure.”

He seemed quite upset, as if I had said something insulting.

“What makes you think that?  On the contrary, I think she looks most respectable.”

“Just look at her bracelets,” I said, “her earrings and her whole dress.  I should not be the least surprised if she were a dancer or a circus rider, but most likely a dancer.  Her whole style smacks very much of the theatre.”

He evidently did not like the idea.

“She is much too young, I am sure; why, she is hardly twenty.”

“Well,” I replied, “there are many things which one can do before one is twenty; dancing and elocution are among them.”

“Take your seats for Nice, Vintimiglia,” the guards and porters called.

We got in; our fellow passenger was eating an orange, and certainly she did not do it elegantly.  She had spread her pocket-handkerchief on her knees, and the way in which she tore off the peel and opened her mouth to put in the pieces, and then spat the pips out of the window, showed that her training had been decidedly vulgar.

She seemed, also, more put out than ever, and swallowed the fruit with an exceedingly comic air of rage.

Paul devoured her with his eyes, and tried to attract her attention and excite her curiosity; but in spite of his talk, and of the manner in which he brought in well-known names, she did not pay the least attention to him.

After passing Frejus and St. Raphael, the train passed through a veritable garden, a paradise of roses, and groves of oranges and lemons covered with fruits and flowers at the same time.  That delightful coast from Marseilles to Genoa is a kingdom of perfumes in a home of flowers.

June is the time to see it in all its beauty, when in every narrow valley and on every slope, the most exquisite flowers are growing luxuriantly.  And the roses! fields, hedges, groves of roses.  They climb up the walls, blossom on the roofs, hang from the trees, peep out from among the bushes; they are white, red, yellow, large and small, single, with a simple self-colored dress, or full and heavy in brilliant toilettes.

Their breath makes the air heavy and relaxing, and the still more penetrating odor of the orange blossoms sweetens the atmosphere till it might almost be called the refinement of odor.