'That was when I was little - over ten years ago.
She is still beautiful."
The train ground on in the hot sunlight, stopping now and again at stations and frequently in between.
They gave the children dejeuner of bread and sausage with a little lemonade.
That kept them amused and occupied for a time, but they were restless and bored.
Ronnie said: 'I do wish we could go and bathe.'
Sheila echoed: 'May we bathe, Monsieur Howard?'
He said: 'We can't bathe, while we're in the train.
Later on, perhaps.
Run along out into the corridor; it's cooler there.'
He turned to Nicole.
They're thinking of a time three days ago - or four was it? - just before we met the Air Force men.
I let them have a bathe in a stream.'
'It was lovely,' said Ronnie.
'Ever so cool and nice.'
He turned and ran with his sister out into the corridor followed by Willem.
Nicole said: 'The English are great swimmers, are they not, monsieur?
Even the little ones think of nothing else.'
He had not thought about his country in that way:
'Are we?' he said.
'Is that how we appear?'
She shrugged her shoulders,.
'I do not know so many English people,' she said frankly.
'But John - he liked more than anything for us to go bathing.'
He smiled.
'John was a very good swimmer,' he said reminiscently. 'He was very fond of it.'
She said: 'He was very, very naughty, Monsieur Howard.
He would not do any of the things that one should do when one visits Paris for the first time.
I had prepared so carefully for his visit - yes, I had arranged for each day the things that we would do.
On the first day of all I had planned to go to the Louvre, but imagine it - he was not interested.
Not at all.'
The old man smiled again.
'He never was one for museums, much,' he said.
She said: 'That may be correct in England, monsieur, but in Paris one should see the things that Paris has to show.
It was very embarrassing, I assure you.
I had arranged that he should see the Louvre, and the Trocadero, and for a contrast the Musee de 1'Homme, and the museum at Cluny, and I had a list of galleries of modern art that I would show him.
And he never saw any of it at all!'
'I'm sorry about that,' said Howard.
There seemed nothing else to say.
'What did you do?'
She said: 'We went bathing several times, at the Piscine Molitor in Auteuil.
It was very hot weather, sunny all the time.
I could not get him into one museum - not one!
He was very, very naughty.'
'I expect that was very pleasant, though,' he said.
She smiled. 'It was not what I had arranged,' she said.
'I had not even got a costume.
We had to go together, John and I, to buy a bathing-costume.
Never have I done a thing like that before.
It was a good thing I had said that we would meet in Paris, not in Chartres.