I walked in a world of their invention--they had no occasion whatever
to draw upon mine; so that my time was taken only with being,
for them, some remarkable person or thing that the game of
the moment required and that was merely, thanks to my superior,
my exalted stamp, a happy and highly distinguished sinecure.
I forget what I was on the present occasion; I only remember
that I was something very important and very quiet and that Flora
was playing very hard. We were on the edge of the lake, and, as we
had lately begun geography, the lake was the Sea of Azof.
Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that, on the
other side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator.
The way this knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing
in the world--the strangest, that is, except the very much
stranger in which it quickly merged itself. I had sat down with
a piece of work--for I was something or other that could sit--
on the old stone bench which overlooked the pond; and in this
position I began to take in with certitude, and yet without
direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a third person.
The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great and pleasant shade,
but it was all suffused with the brightness of the hot, still hour.
There was no ambiguity in anything; none whatever, at least,
in the conviction I from one moment to another found myself
forming as to what I should see straight before me and across
the lake as a consequence of raising my eyes.
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