The train moved slowly, almost ruminatingly, along the golden landscape, a little local train stopping at every station. The crops were still uncut and their vast undulations were broken only by lines of lonely, poplared road, or marshalled woods venturing out, here and there, upon the plains. Empty and rather sad, for all the splendour of the gold beneath, the blue above, it looked to Giles; but that might have been, he knew, because of its associations for him with scenes of the war; and he was feeling a little sick, too, apprehensions of the approaching future seizing him as he and Alix sat silent in the second-class carriage, where both the windows were tightly shut. Alix had widely opened hers on entering, but at the first station a lady had got in—little shopping people of the local _bourgeoisie_ the passengers were, more estranged from fashion, Giles thought, than their equivalent English types—and, wrapping a scarf at once about her neck, she had complained of the effect of the _courant d’air_ upon her _névralgie_. Without comment, Alix at once closed her window. No doubt she knew her compatriots and recognized the futility of discussion on this theme; but Giles reflected that Ruth and Rosemary would not so have submitted. They would have entered into altercation with the lady in the scarf and found pleasure in demonstrating her folly to her even if they did not succeed in keeping the window open. But to Alix altercation had no charms. Even when the lady, still mysteriously aggrieved in her furthest corner, murmured resentfully on about _les anglais qui viennent nous déranger_, Alix glanced meditatively at her for a moment and then resumed her survey of the landscape, indifferent to the misapprehension; and since Giles could not repress a smile, the lady, who still held up her scarf in retrospective protest, kept indignant eyes upon him. “Now, you know, you _are_ a worse-tempered people than we are. She’s still nursing her wrongs,” Giles murmured, and Alix, glancing at the lady of the _névralgie_, answered, “She is negligible.” Two men sat further on; one young, with high, ardent, excited eyes, like a collie’s, in a thin head; the other obese and red with white hair _en brosse_ and a purple nip of ribbon in his button-hole. They leaned across the carriage towards each other and talked without cessation, rapping each other on the chest to a constant refrain of: “_Puis—il me dit;—Et—je lui dis._” Passionately swift and even vindictive in utterance as they were, their personal geniality remained unimpaired.