YVONNE TO HER MOTHER

Vire.

Dear Mama: I am the happiest thing in the whole wide world, and Lee is the grandest fellow! I must write you everything, and you will see.

The morning after I last wrote, Uncle had me waked up at seven and wrote on a scrap of paper, "We leave for Bayeux at 8.30." I was just about sick, for I knew he wasn't able to, and then, besides, if we left so early, I surely shouldn't see Lee again. But I got up and dressed, of course, and I was beside myself to find some way of sending Lee a scrap of a good-by before we took a cab for the gare. Uncle was in high spirits over getting out again, and all went well until it came the minute to get him on to the train. Well, I do believe he was scared himself. Getting on to a French train is almost like going up a ladder that slopes the wrong way, I always think, and it took two commissionaires to hoist Uncle into the coupÉ. He was awfully worried over it, I could see, for he talked about what an outrageous idiot Mr. Chopstone was all the way to Bayeux. We had to get out there, of course, and I was beside myself to know how to manage. In the end Uncle came down so suddenly that he nearly crushed me and a meek, good-hearted little Frenchman who had kindly offered to help assist.

The gare at Bayeux is quite a walk from the part of the town where the sights are and there wasn't a cab or a thing on wheels. I didn't dare look at Uncle, for there is no train back till four in the afternoon. He seemed a bit staggered at first, and then he said well, it was level, and we'd go leisurely along and enjoy the fresh, pure, sweet air of the country. So we walked along, but I could see he wasn't enjoying it a bit, and it took us a half-hour to get to where we were going. We went to the cathedral first, and Uncle sat right down and said he wanted time enough to enjoy the ground-work of the vaulting and that I could just leave him and go around alone. It was my first chance to look at anything as slow as I liked, and I really did enjoy myself very much.

It's a really wonderful old cathedral, and I found a nice old sacristan behind the altar, and he took me underneath into the crypt, and the crypt is the original church where Harold took the oath. It was slowly buried by the dirt of centuries, and when they started to put a furnace in a few years ago, they found it and dug it out again. It isn't very large, and the walls are of stone several feet thick, with little bits of arched windows set up too high to see from.

When I came back we went to see the tapestry in the museum, and it isn't really tapestry at all: it's a long, long strip of linen about a foot wide, with scenes embroidered on it in Kensington, and over and over. It's really very well done, and it isn't a bit badly worn out—only a few little holes here and there. The scenes are very interesting, and some of them are awfully funny. The way they hauled the horses over the sides of the boats when they landed in England, for example. The Saxons have beards, and the Normans are shaven. I couldn't help thinking how funny it was that the Normans, who were regarded as barbarians by the French, were looked upon as tremendously effete by the English. Uncle took a deal of pleasure studying the whole thing, and we were there till it was time for lunch. We had a nice lunch at a clean little place, and then came the rub. There was nothing to do till train-time, and that terrible walk to the gare. I had brought a book along, so I could read aloud, but Uncle said only a woman would come to Bayeux and read a novel, and that I reminded him of Aunt Jane. You know how terrible it is when any one reminds him of Aunt Jane; so I closed the book at once, and said I'd do anything he liked. He said that that was more like Aunt Jane than ever, to just sit back and throw the whole burden on to him; and then he shook his watch and held it to his ear and said "Hum!" too, one right after the other. I was almost beside myself to know what to do or what to suggest, and just then something came puffing up behind us and stopped right at our side. It was a big automobile, with three men in it, and one jerked off his mask and jumped out over the wheel and grabbed Uncle by the hand. And it was Lee!

You never saw anything like Uncle's face! He seemed reparalyzed for a few seconds, and Lee kept shaking his hand and telling him how glad he was to see him, and how he must get right into the automobile and go on with them to Caen. My heart just about stopped beating, I was so anxious, but Lee never stopped shaking, and the other men took off their masks and got out, too, and told Uncle he really must do them the honor and give them the pleasure, and in the end we got him in, and Lee won out.

Oh, it was such fun! We had the most glorious trip back to Caen. They had an extra mask along, and Uncle wore it and sat on the front seat, and Mr. Peters, the man who owns the automobile, was really lovely to him. The other man and Lee and I sat behind, and the other man is Mr. Peters's mother's son by her second husband. His name is Archie Stowell, and I should judge that Mr. Peters's mother's second husband was a lot livelier than the first, but not so clever. Mr. Peters is really awfully clever, and the way he talked to Uncle was wonderful. Uncle said it was a very smooth-riding automobile, and Mr. Peters said it did him good all through to meet some one who recognized the good points of a good machine at once; he said not one man in a thousand had brains enough to know a good machine when he was in it, and that he was overjoyed to have accidentally met the one man who did discriminate. And Uncle said he should judge that automobiling was a very easy way of getting over the ground when one was traveling in Europe, and Mr. Peters said it was perfectly bewildering how the breadth and scope of Uncle's mind could instantaneously seize and weigh every side of an intricate proposition and as instantaneously solve it completely. By the time we reached Caen Uncle was so saturated with Mr. Peters that he even smiled on Lee as we got out and asked them all three to dine with us at eight. They accepted, and went to their hotel to dress, and Uncle went to his room without one word of any kind to me.

They came, and we had a very nice dinner in a little separate room, and the way Mr. Peters talked to Uncle was worth listening to surely. And when Uncle was talking, he leaned forward and paid attention as if his life depended on every word. By ten o'clock Uncle was happier than I have almost ever seen him, and Mr. Peters said it was no use, we just simply must join their party and go on in the automobile. Lee began to laugh when he said that, and said: "Now, Peters, you'll learn the sensation of getting turned down cold." It was an awful second for me, because I just felt Uncle's terrible battle between not wanting to go on with Lee and wanting to contradict him; but in the end the wanting to contradict overpowered everything else, and he said: "Young man, when you are as old as I am you'll be less ready to speak for other people than you seem disposed to do now."