A traveller, glancing up at the little three-storey house with 'Poste
et Telegraphe' above the door, could never guess how busy the world
that came and went beneath its red-tiled roof. In spring the wistaria
tree (whence the Pension borrowed its brave name, Les Glycines) hangs
its blossoms between 'Poste' and 'Telegraphe,' and the perfume of
invisible lilacs drenches the street from the garden at the back.
Beyond, the road dips past the bee-hives of _la cure_; and Boudry
towers with his five thousand feet of blue pine woods over the
horizon. The tinkling of several big stone fountains fills the street.
But the traveller would not linger, unless he chanced to pass at
twelve o'clock and caught the stream of people going into their mid-
day dinner at the Pension. And even then he probably would not see the
presiding genius, Madame Jequier, for as often as not she would be in
her garden, busy with eternal bulbs, and so strangely garbed that if
she showed herself at all, it would be with a shrill, plaintive
explanation--'Mais il ne faut pas me regarder. Je suis invisible!'
Whereupon, consistently, she would not speak again, but flit in
silence to and fro, as though she were one of those spirits she so
firmly believed in, and sometimes talked to by means of an old
Planchette.
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