"I know!" Miss Cheriton smiled too. "Mr. Bronson has spoken of it to me."
"Has he?" asked Marie-Aimée, brightening still further, rainbow-like, and immediately at greater ease with Miss Cheriton, from a responsiveness she felt in her smile when the ever fertile subject of the tour was broached, dear in its time to Anthony Bronson's heart. "That's good. For it will in part explain.... Don't you agree with me that laughing together makes a stronger bond than even weeping? Well, on that tour, what we did best and chiefly, was to laugh. Did he ever tell you----" She dropped her voice like a person having something good to relate, and fun played over her face in ripples, "the adventure of the water-melon? Yes, of course! I suppose he has told you everything. And the adventure of the face-wash and the curling-irons? And the night of the great thunderstorm? Oh, make him tell you that one. It is incredible, the number of things, and the description of things, that happened to us in those six months. It was as if we had been a sort of lightening-rod attracting all the incongruous, ludicrous, delicious happenings that should have been distributed over the country. Or else, it is that we were in a disposition of mind to find everything funny. Of course, it may have been that. But still--imagine our arriving once at a little place where we had never been heard of. There is a mistake. And no one expects us. And there is no hotel. And it ends in our being obliged to sleep in the empty jail, we women, a dovecote of a jail, with just two wee cells; oh, slumbers of sweetness and safety, after our many nights in strange hostelries. No need for once to look under the bed for burglars; and the men in a barn. Odiesky didn't get the hayseed out of his hair that season. And imagine--imagine having along with you a man who has a nightmare every time he drops off to sleep. A poor Mr. Snell who went with us was like that, and we used to run into one another in the lobbies, in curl-papers, at dead of night, flying to knock him up, he made such awful, such blood-curdling sounds, which could be heard all over the hotel. It is unkind to laugh at an infirmity, but the sounds he made, could you have heard them, would excuse me to you. And imagine--but try to--imagine the six of us, six people who feel themselves not a little famous, going fourteen miles in a single-seated wagon, that, or miss our connection, and complications without end. I don't believe I stopped laughing the whole way. You see it? We two, the grace and beauty of the party, enthroned upon the laps of _ces messieurs_--no other way, no other way possible, none. Wharton-Duprez in the arms of her own husband; and Odiesky astride the horse, postilion, having to drive; and poor little Snell on the floor with his knees over the dash-board; and the danger at any moment of the wagon breaking down----" She pieced out that fourteen-mile long ecstasy of merriment with more of a singularly rich, unaffected laugh, in the midst of which her face fell blankly serious, and she held up, as if she had never seen it before, the hand which in the heat of her description she had been waving.