We began to go downhill; and then met, climbing on foot, on a bicycle, in a cart or carriage, one of those creatures⁠—flowers of a fine day but unlike the flowers of the field, for each of them secretes something that is not to be found in another, with the result that we can never satisfy upon any of her fellows the desire which she has brought to birth in us⁠—a farm-girl driving her cow or half-lying along a wagon, a shopkeeper’s daughter taking the air, a fashionable young lady erect on the backseat of a landau, facing her parents. Certainly Bloch had been the means of opening a new era and had altered the value of life for me on the day when he had told me that the dreams which I had entertained on my solitary walks along the Méséglise way, when I hoped that some peasant girl might pass whom I could take in my arms, were not a mere fantasy which corresponded to nothing outside myself, but that all the girls one met, whether villagers or “young ladies,” were alike ready and willing to give ear to such prayers.