to a solid position. They hurried on their way, ashamed of their condescension toward this real estate, feeling a little as if the proprietor, reduced to the last ditch, was going to make his appearance from a grave and borrow money from them.
After an hour's walk under the blue cupola in which carolling larks were darting, through fields of aftermath exhaling perfume from every rick, all of them, without daring to say so, were beginning to have enough of the blue and green, of the little farms and the big estates whose owners they did not know. A halt was made in a little wood of fir trees, the only one in the district, a horrible little artificial grotto placed there by the proprietor, the Dobouziez' chief clerk, a fellow who understood "country pleasures" and "al-fresco breakfasts." They had skirted superb avenues of generously shady beeches and oaks, all beseeching them to halt. But they must needs have a wood, even though that wood were wretched and scraggly.
The ladies' parasols supplemented the miserly shade of the firs. The provisions were unpacked, and they ate cold food and drank warm drinks, the ingenious apparatus for freezing the champagne having refused to work, as such things usually do. Nevertheless, the luncheon was very gay, subjects for conversation not being lacking, thanks to the cursed apparatus and the heat. The bugs and caterpillars that fell into plates and upon the necks of the ladies gave Gaston and Athanasius Saint-Fardier an opportunity to remove them from Angéle and Cora Vanderling, near whom they had placed themselves, and whose coquetry held them fast.
A company of little peasants returning from high
