“‘But though we dine in the village, we will take our own wine with us,’ he said, ‘a wine surfin—­one of my wines—­you shall see—­’

“Then he showed us round his place—­I forget how many hundreds of acres of vines, and into the great building with the presses and pumps and casks and the huge barrel they call the thunderbolt—­and about seven o’clock we walked back to Darbisson to dinner, carrying our wine with us.  I think the restaurant we dined in was the only one in the place, and our gaillard of a host—­he was a straight-backed, well-set-up chap, with rather fine eyes—­did us on the whole pretty well.  His wine certainly was good stuff, and set our tongues going....

“A moment ago I said a fellow like Rangon leads a restricted sort of life in those parts.  I saw this more clearly as dinner went on.  We dined by an open window, from which we could see the stream with the planks across it where the women washed clothes during the day and assembled in the evening for gossip.  There were a dozen or so of them there as we dined, laughing and chatting in low tones—­they all seemed pretty—­it was quickly falling dusk—­all the girls are pretty then, and are quite conscious of it—­you know, Marsham.  Behind them, at the end of the street, one of these great cypress wind-screens showed black against the sky, a ragged edge something like the line the needle draws on a rainfall chart; and you could only tell whether they were men or women under the plantains by their voices rippling and chattering and suddenly a deeper note....  Once I heard a muffled scuffle and a sound like a kiss....  It was then that Rangon’s little trouble came out....

“It seemed that he didn’t know any girls—­wasn’t allowed to know any girls.  The girls of the village were pretty enough, but you see how it was—­he’d a position to keep up—­appearances to maintain—­couldn’t be familiar during the year with the girls who gathered his grapes for him in the autumn....  And as soon as Carroll gave him a chance, he began to ask us questions, about England, English girls, the liberty they had, and so on.

“Of course, we couldn’t tell him much he hadn’t heard already, but that made no difference; he could stand any amount of that, our strapping young vigneron; and he asked us questions by the dozen, that we both tried to answer at once.  And his delight and envy!...  What!  In England did the young men see the young women of their own class without restraint—­the sisters of their friends meme—­even at the house?  Was it permitted that they drank tea with them in the afternoon, or went without invitation to pass the soiree?...  He had all the later Prevosts in his room, he told us (I don’t doubt he had the earlier ones also); Prevost and the Disestablishment between them must be playing the mischief with the convent system of education for young girls; and our young man was—­what d’you call it?—­’Co-ed’—­co-educationalist—­by Jove, yes!...  He seemed to marvel that we should have left a country so blessed as England to visit his dusty, wild-lavender-smelling, girl-less Provence....  You don’t know half your luck, Marsham....