She may well have been tired; for Doug, of late, had been most abnormally fit. The open-air life agreed with him--he positively zig-zagged health from all angles of his body, like the gentleman in magazine advertisements. His energy ran over and spilt itself in all directions; he raced and jumped and bathed and dived and climbed, and leapt three times backwards and forwards over a stile, where once would have done; he talked louder than usual, because he had so much abundant voice left over from ordinary talking. And all this exercise gave him appetite for huge meals, and the huge meals built up his strength for further superlative exercise; he dragged Ursula out for long, rough, cross-country walks in all weathers, but preferably during the cold rainy spells which whipped June into July that year. Wraps he forbade, because of a certain fetish called “hardening”; he himself strode exultantly through all weathers, clad in loose cotton shirts and footer shorts; the skin of his knees, chest and arms, burnt to a crude mahogany, were his perpetual delight and boast. He did not sit--he flung himself down; he did not stand--he leapt to his feet. A portion of his left-over vitality after a stiff morning’s farm-work, he worked off on a patter-shuffle-clog-dance of his own invention; a little more, on the unwearied training of his dog to impossibilities. His dog was a good-looking young wire-haired terrier; a living affirmative of the axiom that the dog is the dumb devoted friend of man, but a stubborn contradiction of the further proposition that the dog is an intelligent beast. Rough was a fool, and most anxious to please Doug. For hours at a stretch, he strode beside Ursula across the moors, “training” Rough to follow. “Rough--Rough--good dog--hi--here--drop that--to heel, I say--heel--heel ... good dog ... good little fellow.... Rough (Sorry darling, what were you saying?)--Hi--Rough--here, I say....” Nor did his vigour content itself without battering on all the doors of Ursula’s life--“Ouvre moi ta porte, pour l’amour de Dieu”--like Love-locked-out fortified by Sanatogen! “We must be all-in-all to each other, Teddy!” he declared again and again. And: “Tell me what you’re thinking about!” Discovering, surprised, at this period, that her shyness resented his loving “stand and deliver” attitude--for she had thought shyness was over long ago--she invented a reserve store of thoughts that would do well enough for these occasions. Thoughts not too obvious--sometimes she became quite interested in them as they unwound into speech.... “What are you thinking of, Teddy?” Doug flopped out of the sea, and lay in a damp glow beside her on the rock. Ursula considered him attentively, then she said: “Anyone can bask, after a bathe, in hot sunshine; but it takes you to bask in a cutting wind under a grey sky.”