It was as if he had found out he was tired--tired not from his walk, but from that inward exercise which had known, on the whole, for three months, so little intermission.

That was it--when once they were off he had dropped; this moreover was what he had dropped to, and now he was touching bottom.

He was kept luxuriously quiet, soothed and amused by the consciousness of what he had found at the end of his descent.

It was very much what he had told Maria Gostrey he should like to stay on for, the hugely-distributed Paris of summer, alternately dazzling and dusky, with a weight lifted for him off its columns and cornices and with shade and air in the flutter of awnings as wide as avenues.

It was present to him without attenuation that, reaching out, the day after making the remark, for some proof of his freedom, he had gone that very afternoon to see Madame de Vionnet.