As soon as I am on a boat I feel the need of walking to and fro, like a sailor on watch.  Why?  I do not know.  Therefore I began to thread my way along the deck through the crowd of travellers.  Suddenly I heard my name called.  I turned around.  I beheld one of my old friends, Henri Sidoine, whom I had not seen for ten years.

We shook hands and continued our walk together, talking of one thing or another.  Suddenly Sidoine, who had been observing the crowd of passengers, cried out angrily: 

“It’s disgusting, the boat is full of English people!”

It was indeed full of them.  The men were standing about, looking over the ocean with an all-important air, as though to say:  “We are the English, the lords of the sea!  Here we are!”

The young girls, formless, with shoes which reminded one of the naval constructions of their fatherland, wrapped in multi-colored shawls, were smiling vacantly at the magnificent scenery.  Their small heads, planted at the top of their long bodies, wore English hats of the strangest build.

And the old maids, thinner yet, opening their characteristic jaws to the wind, seemed to threaten one with their long, yellow teeth.  On passing them, one could notice the smell of rubber and of tooth wash.

Sidoine repeated, with growing anger: 

“Disgusting!  Can we never stop their coming to France?”

I asked, smiling: 

“What have you got against them?  As far as I am concerned, they don’t worry me.”

He snapped out: 

“Of course they don’t worry you!  But I married one of them.”

I stopped and laughed at him.

“Go ahead and tell me about it.  Does she make you very unhappy?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“No, not exactly.”

“Then she—­is not true to you?”

“Unfortunately, she is.  That would be cause for a divorce, and I could get rid of her.”

“Then I’m afraid I don’t understand!”

“You don’t understand?  I’m not surprised.  Well, she simply learned how to speak French—­that’s all!  Listen.

“I didn’t have the least desire of getting married when I went to spend the summer at Etretat two years ago.  There is nothing more dangerous than watering-places.  You have no idea how it suits young girls.  Paris is the place for women and the country for young girls.

“Donkey rides, surf-bathing, breakfast on the grass, all these things are traps set for the marriageable man.  And, really, there is nothing prettier than a child about eighteen, running through a field or picking flowers along the road.

“I made the acquaintance of an English family who were stopping at the same hotel where I was.  The father looked like those men you see over there, and the mother was like all other Englishwomen.

“They had two sons, the kind of boys who play rough games with balls, bats or rackets from morning till night; then came two daughters, the elder a dry, shrivelled-up Englishwoman, the younger a dream of beauty, a heavenly blonde.  When those chits make up their minds to be pretty, they are divine.  This one had blue eyes, the kind of blue which seems to contain all the poetry, all the dreams, all the hopes and happiness of the world!