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the coast some time or other. We manage to see most of those who do.”
    She picked up a copy of Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith. “This is by one of your compatriots. We saw quite a bit of him in London. I suppose you know him.”
    He smiled. “I’m afraid that I move in very humble circles.”
    â€œYou won’t much longer, painting the way you do.” She paused. She looked at him thoughtfully. “Is that really true about your not being in love with anyone?”
    â€œQuite true.”
    Her eyes retained their thoughtful expression for a moment, then she picked out another book. “ Peter Whiffle, His Life and Works by Carl Van Vechton. That’s another of your compatriots who’s bilingual.”
    She said it on a note of interrogation. Again he shook his head.
    â€œI don’t even know very many painters. I’ve been too busy working to meet many people.”
    â€œYou’re very wise. I’ve kown so many writers who estimate their success by the houses that they dine at. And of course the trouble is that in many walks of life that is the test, the people that one’s liked and trusted by.”
    She said it carelessly, as though it were a comment of no account in the same way that she had talked the day before of the artist’s struggle, of the artist’s need for roots. She does understand what one’s up against, he thought. He recalled the innumerable essays he had read on the function of the artist, on the position of the artist in society. They had employed a number of impressive words but they had none of them seen pictures as the painter saw them, as the solution or failure to solve a series of direct personal problems. Nothing that he had read in those intimate biographies had given him so much of an insight into the nature of his own difficulties as these casual remarks of Judy’s.
    They moved along the shelves, looking at the ornaments that were along the top, two green jade dolphins from Gump’s in San Francisco, a short curved Malayan knife, some Persian paintings upon ivory; the pictures were arranged with a full two-foot gap between them. She stood ruminatively below a small Van Gogh still life. “It’s the best picture in the room. But it hasn’t any personal meaning for me. I think it’s the one that’ll have to make way for one of yours.”
    At the end of the shelves, she knelt down beside a pile of albums. She hesitated. “I’d like to show you these. They’re my photographs, but I couldn’t bear to see you get drowsy over them. Perhaps we’d better have a swim first to freshen us. No, not in the sea, silly, in our cistern.”
    The cistern was circular, of concrete, nine feet high and some twenty feet across. It provided the irrigation of the estate. It was set some fifty yards behind the house. A rough path wound up to it through the vineyards. As she tossed off her long white bathrobe at the foot of the iron ladder leading up to the cistern, he gave a start. She was wearing a tight dark-blue one-piece bathing dress. He had had no idea that she would be so beautiful. She noticed his start and smiled.“That thing you lent me yesterday would fool anyone,” she said.
    He watched her entranced as she scampered up the ladder. How old had she said she was, over thirty? She was so vivid, so supple, she had such a zest for living. One barely thought of her as twenty.
    â€œHurry up,” she shouted. “It’s heaven here.”
    In Maine, even in midsummer, the water in the cistern would have seemed lukewarm, but here in contrast to the Provencal heat his first plunge into it made him gasp. She laughed. “Isn’t this different from your clammy coast? Can’t you guess what this does to you every morning, and look at the view, have you seen anything like it ever?”
    The west side of the Esterels was cut off by the rising hill, but the whole southeast of the