Here men and women in toga and flowing draperies have whiled away
leisure hours, spun day-dreams, made love, or schemed affairs of state
and personal ambition. To-day, it is still the resort of Nimes where
everyone meets everyone else, either by design or by the chance
intercourse of a small town.
On a morning of _mistral_, Riviere was seated in the pleasant warmth of
the Jardin, planning out a special piece of apparatus for his coming
research-work. He was concentrating intently--so intently that he did
not notice Miss Verney passing him with a very professional-looking
campstool, easel and sketch-book.
This second encounter was pure accident. Elaine had no intentions
whatever of following the man who had left Arles with such boorish
brusqueness, without even the conventional good-bye at the
breakfast-table. She had come to Nimes because she was a worker, because
this town contained special material necessary to her bread-winning.
She had guessed that Riviere's hurried departure from Arles was made in
order to avoid meeting her. It hurt. Woman-like, she set more value on a
few pleasant words of farewell over a breakfast-table and a warm
handshake than on a defence from assault at the risk of a man's life.
The seeming illogicality of woman is of course a mere surface illusion.
It hides a train of reasoning very different to a man's. It is a mental
short-cut like an Irishman's "bull," which condenses a whole chain of
thought into a single link.
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