That odour of herbage that she could smell--she wondered from what countryside it had blown hither to this asphalt desert? She pictured the splash of her crushed body on the pavement, surrounded by an eddy of policemen and loiterers.... (“You’re too imaginative to kill yourself, Thérèse!”) In truth, she did not want to die; there was a task before her now--not of vengeance or of hatred; but that little fool away at Saint Clair, who thought happiness possible, must learn, like Thérèse, that happiness does not exist. If they possess nothing else in common, let them at least have this: boredom, no rational occupation, nothing to look forward to but the sordid daily round,--irremediable solitude. The dawn lit up the roofs; she rejoined her motionless companion on the bed; but the moment she lay down beside him he drew nearer. She awoke, clear-headed and self-possessed. What were these wandering desires? Her family had asked for her help and she would do as they wished; then she could not go astray. Thérèse agreed with Bernard when he said that if Anne missed the Deguilhem marriage it would be a disaster. The Deguilhems did not belong to their world: the grandfather had been a shepherd.... Yes, but they had the finest pines in the district: and, after all, Anne was not particularly well off: she had nothing to expect from her father except the vines in the marsh, near Langon--which were under water one year out of two. Anne must on no account miss the Deguilhem marriage. The smell of chocolate in the room upset Thérèse; this slight feeling of sickness confirmed other signs: she was going to have a baby already. “Much better to have it at once,” said Bernard, “and then we won’t have to think anything more about it.” And he eyed respectfully the woman who bore within her the sole owner of innumerable pines. CHAPTER V Saint Clair! They would soon be there. Thérèse measured with her eye the distance that her thought had traversed; could she get Bernard to follow her so far? She did not dare to hope that he would consent to move so slowly along that tortuous road. And yet the essential had not yet been spoken: “Even when I have brought him as far as this, I shall still have everything to tell him.” She brooded over the enigma that was herself, she passed in review the young married women of her class whose virtues were so highly praised by every one, at the time she settled down at Saint Clair; and she reconstructed the first weeks of her life in the cool dark house of her parents-in-law. The shutters were always closed on the side looking on to the Market Square; but, on the left, through a barred window, could be seen the garden, on fire with heliotrope, geraniums, and petunias. Thérèse came and went, a confidant and an accomplice, between the La Trave couple ambushed in the depths of a little dark sitting-room, on the ground floor, and Anne wandering in the garden which she was forbidden to leave. She said to the La Traves: