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would be outraged; but France is not one of them. Saint-Féliu was quite prepared to watch Francisco paint, so long as he did not give himself airs.
    What little stir it did create tended to put Francisco into a slightly romantic rather than a ridiculous position, and this vexed Dominique, vexed and worried her. But if she had been able to hear the conversation of the two young people in the fragrant dusk of the orange grove beyond the tunnel she would have worried less. The conversation now took the form of a lecture upon aesthetics, very earnest, and very long: listening, Dominique would have heard nothing but Francisco’s voice going on and on, grave and expositive, sometimes deriding and sometimes indignant, but never pausing, except for the moments when Madeleine said yes. Dominique would have heard some strange things indeed, that a picture should never tell a story, that it need not even show a known form; that the cave men painted finer things than Ingres, and that it was very wicked to be an academic. She would have heard the words impressionist, primitive, futurist, expressionist, and abstract recurring again and again; and again and again the litany of Picasso, Braque, and Matisse, Maillol, Dufy, and Vlaminck. She would have heard all that and much more, if she had had the patience; but she would have heard nothing to cause her alarm. Dominique need not have worried, but she did, and the more she did so, the more eagerly she looked forward to Francisco’s calling-up: all safety seemed to lie in that blessed event. In her own short bloom she had been a flighty piece, widely affectionate, and she was sure that it would be the same with Madeleine: a few months’ absence and the young man would be lost.
    But still the years passed slowly, and still he did not go. She did have one respite, for Carmen died, and at the tail of her noisy grief the recollection came to her that now Madeleine was to be secluded and dressed in black. This dried her tears, and the event that she had sincerely mourned seemed now a positive relief.
    Yet even in Saint-Féliu mourning for a cousin cannot last for ever: it can take up a great deal of energy, black cloth, and time, but it has an end, and the day came when Dominique and her two sisters sat working out the date again, the time of the young man’s removal, reckoning up the months with an angry impatience.
    As it came nearer Dominique looked forward to it with pleasure and relief: but when it came she was not in Saint-Féliu, nor was Madeleine, nor was her husband, nor any one of her uncounted relatives and friends and customers. Grass, knee-high, was growing against her shuttered door, and between the cobbles of the street grass and long-drawn weeds strained up toward the narrow slit of sky: the fishing boats, dragged up to the Place and chained there, lay sunk in a green haze of grass, and in the grass the trodden lanes showed the track of the German sentry’s round.
    The inhabitants of Saint-Féliu were dispersed about the interior, and the Fajals were far inland, right under the mountains of Andorra, where some remote cousins had a farm. Francisco, with many others, was in Germany, working at forced labor in a factory; a great many more were in camps as prisoners of war; a few were in North Africa, having escaped through Spain; and six from Saint-Féliu were dead, killed in the early fighting.
    It was a strange, slow nightmare, all that period, impossible to relate to real life. That only began again with the return to Saint-Féliu, with the opening of the long-shut familiar doors, with the re-creation of something like the known old life, going to the same pump with the same crazy, shrieking handle, going up the same number of stairs to bed, waking in the dark to hear the same cry of the fishermen waking the laggards, “Xica-té, es l’alba.”
    Real life appeared to begin again as soon as the Germans had gone, but in fact a long interval of excess came between that time and