Windsor Magazine/A Comedy of Styles

A COMEDY OF STYLES
By E. F. BENSON
THE blaze of the January sun was pouring down on to the huge rink at Frédon, hot and invigorating, and yet by that inimitable conjuring trick which the sun so deftly performs all day in the high thin air of Alpine eyries, not melting one fragment of the ice, nor making the surface of it even soft. Above stretched steep pastures covered with fresh-fallen snow, and dotted with chalets fit to be hung on some immense Christmas tree, complete and toy-like with their little green-shuttered windows and their icicles depending from the snow-smothered eaves of the shingled roofs. Above, again, stretched the forest of pines, looking raven-black, where the snow had melted from off their tassels, against the shining dazzle of the white fields, while behind and beyond, remote and austere, rose the horns and precipices of the greater peaks.
Below, the ground declined sharply away: a few outlying chalets of the village stood in the foreground; beyond them the hillside leaped like a waterfall into the cloud-smothered valley of the Rhone, a couple of thousand feet below. Like a solid floor of grey mottled marble, this platform of cloud-land, as seen from above, s

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