They went through the meadows of thick grass, along the narrow canal that unites, as it cuts a long strip of earth, the large lake of Sils with the smaller lake of Silvaplana; they walked like somnambulists immersed in a dream of fervid youth and palpitating exhilaration; they went hand in hand with rapid steps to join the two ladies who were waiting for them up there beyond the bridge; towards the large, green wood before the charming, bright houses of Sils Maria, houses all adorned with galleries, balconies, and little windows. They went with steps ever more rapid, because the very pale sun was setting in too clear a sky, and for the first time they observed with distracted and wandering eyes the pallor of sun and sky.
Miss May Ford and Miss Clara James were seated in the outside, covered vestibule of the Hôtel Edelweiss which was all adorned with flowers; they were seated at a table and were taking tea placidly and waiting. Two men were with them; one was Massimo Granata, the Italian, one of the oldest lovers of the mountains and sojourners in the Engadine, with his face of an old child, that is rickety and ill, where above the yellowishness of the rugged skin, above the scanty, colourless beard and bony cheek-bones, only the eyes had a ray of divine goodness, while his awkward body, badly dressed in a coarse grey mountain suit, abandoned itself on a seat as if disjointed, while his knotted, shrunken hands were sorting bunches of fresh edelweiss on a table and making nosegays of them; the other was Paul Léon, an Italian by origin, whose family must have been called Leone at Perugia, whence he came, but which had been changed into Léon after living thirty or forty years in France--Paul Léon, the French poet, much discussed and much admired for his lofty genius, his pride, and his wit, now of a cutting irony, now benevolent. At Sils Maria they found Miss May Ford, with a tender and sensible soul beneath a cold appearance, and Miss Clara James, the daughter of England's greatest spiritualist, an illustrious philosopher and poet who had died three years previously, but who was not dead to his daughter, since she spoke with him every night or believed she spoke with him, and she had remained an old maid so as to be able to have communication with the world of spirits; Massimo Granata, who every day made long walks, had climbed the most impenetrable paths and scrambled up the steepest rocks, solely through this invincible love of his of the mountains and his loving quest of mountain flowers; and Paul Léon, the friend of Miss James, who despised the follies of the sojourners at St. Moritz Bad and scoffed at the cosmopolitans of the "Palace" and the "Kulm," and who in his poetic pride lodged in a little inn at Sils Maria and every day went to watch the little window where Friedrich Nietzsche had worked for fourteen springs and summers in a very modest furnished house, and in a very modest room of that house, Paul Léon who loved the country and that district where he had come for years, every year withdrawing from the advance of the ever-invading crowd from district to district in the search for solitude, who loved Massimo Granata as an ideal type of moral beauty, and admired Miss James for her noble, daughterly hallucination.