"Chateau Bougainvillaea."
Midway through a ten-day holiday in the north of France, a young schoolteacher is irritated by the mercenary small-mindedness of her fiancee, a draper's assistant. In an abandoned chateau (which she nicknames after a vine that represents the exotic, despite her never having seen it) she feels great happiness and security; these give her the strength to perceive a "deeper discontent" and to admit that, with this man "the future was already a thing of the past." A glimpse at youthful romance and developing maturity. In John O'London's Weekly (April 22, 1938), Atlantic Monthly (January 1939), The Flying Goat (1939), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947), Selected Short Stories of H.E. Bates (1951), Selected Stories (1957), The Good Corn and Other Stories (1974), Elephant's Nest in a Rhubarb Tree & Other Stories (1989). Reprinted in The Valentine Generation and Other Stories (1980, with title "Castle Bougainvillea").