XXIV 
  
PLANS 
  
  
HE used to say to himself as he walked in a 
vast and lonely park, “How beautiful she would 
be in a Court dress, complicated and luxurious 
in the lovely evening air, coming down the 
marble steps of a palace opposite the broad 
lawns and the fountains; for she has naturally 
the air of a princess.” 
Passing by a little later in a city street, he 
stopped in front of a print-seller’s shop, and 
finding a print representing a tropical land-
scape, he said to himself, “Ni, it is not in a pal-
ace that I should like to possess her dear exis-
tence; we should not be at home there; be-
sides, those walls are so cumbered with gold 
that there would be no place to hang her pic-
ture. In those solemn galleries there would be 
no corner for intimacy; decidedly it is there, in 
that landscape, that one ought to dwell, to 
dream one’s life-dream with due worship.” 
And, analysing the details of the engraving, 
he continued in himself, “At the edge of the 
sea a beautiful pleasure-house of wood, sur-