She turned her back on him abruptly. “No offence,” Peyrol excused himself in a tone of gloom rather than of apology. “It is no use to attach any importance to things. What is this life? Phew! Nobody can remember one-tenth of it. Here I am; and, you know, I would bet that if one of my old-time chums came along and saw me like this, here with you--I mean one of those chums that stand up for a fellow in a scrimmage and look after him should he be hurt--well, I bet,” he repeated, “he wouldn’t know me. He would say to himself, perhaps, ‘Hullo! here’s a comfortable married couple.’” He paused. Catherine, with her back to him and calling him, not Monsieur, but Peyrol, _tout court_, remarked, not exactly with displeasure, but rather with an ominous accent, that this was no time for idle talk. Peyrol, however, continued, though his tone was very far from being that of idle talk: “But you see, Mademoiselle Catherine, you were not like the others. You allowed yourself to be struck all of a heap, and at the same time you were too hard on yourself.” Her long thin frame, bent low to work the bellows under the enormous overmantel, she assented: “Perhaps! We Escampobar women were always hard on ourselves.” “That’s what I say. If you had had things happen to you which happened to me....” “But you men, you are different. It doesn’t matter what you do. You have got your own strength. You need not be hard on yourselves. You go from one thing to another thoughtlessly.” He remained looking at her searchingly, with something like a hint of a smile on his shaven lips, but she turned away to the sink, where one of the women working about the farm had deposited a great pile of vegetables. She started on them with a broken-bladed knife, preserving her sibylline air, even in that homely occupation.