Thérèse smiled at the caricature of Bernard that she drew in her mind: she reflected that he was, in point of fact, better than most of the young men she could have married. The women of those moorlands by the sea are much superior to the men, who see no one but each other after they have left school and hardly ever lose their boorishness. Their hearts are in their country, and in spirit they never leave it. They are never really happy anywhere else: they would feel that they were being utterly false to it if they gave up their country clothes, the local dialect, and the rustic habits of their home. Under Bernard’s thick skin there was certainly a sort of goodness of heart. When he was at the point of death the tenants said there wouldn’t be another gentleman left when he had gone. Yes, he was certainly kind, just, and fundamentally honest. He never talked of what he did not know; he accepted his own limitations. In his younger days he had not been bad-looking, this unlicked Hyppolytus, though he was far less interested in girls than in the hares he coursed on the moors. Yet it was not Bernard that Thérèse, with half-closed eyes and leaning her head against the carriage windows, pictured to herself bicycling along the road from Saint Clair to Argelouse, about nine o’clock, before the heat of the day had reached its height; not her cold-blooded suitor, but his little sister Anne, her face all afire in the sunshine;--the grasshoppers were already calling from pine to pine, and the murmurous hum of the moorland, like the roar of a furnace, began to rise up to the sky; and myriads of flies hovered above the tall heather. “You’d better put your cloak on to come into the drawing-room,” she used to say, “it’s like an ice-house”: and Aunt Clara added: “I’ll give you something to drink, dear, when you aren’t quite so hot.” Anne shouted futile words of greeting to the deaf old lady: and Thérèse said: “Don’t make yourself hoarse, darling, she understands everything from the way you move your lips.” But Anne insisted on articulating every word, distorting her young lips in the process, and the Aunt made all sorts of meaningless replies, until the friends had to run away so as to be able to laugh unobserved.