There were days when they almost forgot, and became the light-hearted companions of the lame donkey on Nunsmere Common.
A day on the Seine, for instance, in a steamboat, when the water was miraculously turned to sparkling wine and the great masses of buildings were bathed in amber and the domes of the Pantheon and the Invalides and the cartouches and bosses of the Pont Alexandre III shone burnished gold.
There was Auteuil, with its little open-air restaurants, rustic trellis and creepers, and its _friture_ of gudgeon and dusty salt and cutlery and great yards of bread, which Emmy loved to break with Septimus, like Christmas crackers.

Then, afterwards, there was the winding Seine again, Robinson Crusoe's Island in all its greenery, and St.Cloud with its terrace looking over the valley to Paris wrapped in an amethyst haze, with here and there a triumphant point of glory.
A day also in the woods of Bas Meudon, alone beneath the trees, when they talked like children, and laughed over the luncheon basket which Madame Bolivard had stuffed full of electrifying edibles; when they lay on their backs and looked dreamily at the sky through the leaves, and listened to the chirrup of insects awakening from winter and the strange cracklings and tiny voices of springtide, and gave themselves up to the general vibration of life which accompanies the working of the sap in the trees.
Days, too, in mid-Paris, in the Luxembourg Gardens, among the nursery maids and working folk; at cafes on the remoter boulevards, where the kindly life of Paris, still untouched by touristdom, passes up and down, and the spring gets into the step of youth and sparkles in a girl's eyes.

At the window even of the _appartement_ in the Boulevard Raspail, when the air was startlingly clear and scented and brought the message of spring from far lands, from the golden shores of the Mediterranean, from the windy mountain tops of Auvergne, from the broad, tender green fields of Central France, from every heart and tree and flower, from Paris itself, quivering with life.

At such times they would not talk, both interpreting the message in their own ways, yet both drawn together into a common mood in which they vaguely felt that the earth was still a Land of Romance, that the mystery of rebirth was repeating itself according to unchanging and perpetual law; that inconsiderable, forlorn human atoms though they were, the law would inevitably affect them too, and cause new hopes, new desires, and new happiness to bud and flower in their hearts.
During these spring days there began to dawn in the girl's soul a knowledge of the deeper meaning of things.

When she first met Septimus and delightedly regarded him as a new toy, she was the fluffy, frivolous little animal of excellent breeding and half education, so common in English country residential towns, with the little refinements somewhat coarsened, the little animalism somewhat developed, the little brain somewhat sharpened, by her career on the musical-comedy stage.