At last the train stopped at
a place from which I could look down a side street, and I decided that
Lyons wore a more provincial look than Paris, and I thought of the
great silk trade and the dull minds of the merchants ... their dinner
parties, etc. I noticed everything there was to notice in order to
pass the time; but there was so little of interest that I wrote out a
telegram and ran with it to the office, for Doris did not know what
train I was coming by, and it is pleasant to be met at a station, to
meet one familiar face, not to find oneself amid a crowd of strangers.
Very nearly did I miss the train; my foot was on the footboard when
the guard blew his whistle. "Just fancy if I had missed the train," I
said, and settling myself in my seat I added, "now, let us study the
landscape; such an opportunity as this may never occur again."
The long plain cultivated with tedious regularity that we had been
passing through before we came to Lyons, flowed on field after field;
it seemed as if we should never reach the end of it, and looking on
those same fields, for they were the same, I said to myself: "If I
were an economist that plain would interest me, but since I got
Doris's letter I am primitive man, and he abhors the brown and the
waving field, and 'the spirit in his feet' leads him to some grassy
glen where he follows his flocks, listening to the song of the wilding
bee that sings as it labours amid the gorse.
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