August heat suffered
'a sea change,' and became so much matter for physical delight. It was
fiercely hot indeed. Every morning, between five and six o'clock,
Catherine would stand by the little white-veiled window, in the dewy
silence, to watch the eastern shadows spreading sharply already into a
blazing world of sun, and see the tall poplar just outside shooting into
a quivering changeless depth of blue. Then, as early as possible, they
would sally forth before the glare became unbearable. The first event of
the day was always Mary's bathe, which gradually became a spectacle for
the whole beach, so ingenious were the blandishments of the father who
wooed her into the warm sandy shallows, and so beguiling the glee and
pluck of the two-year-old English _bebe_. By eleven the heat out of
doors grew intolerable, and they would stroll back--father and mother
and trailing child--past the hotels on the _plage_, along the irregular
village lane, to the little house where they had established
themselves, with Mary's nurse and a French _bonne_ to look after them;
would find the green wooden shutters drawn close; the _dejeuner_ waiting
for them in the cool bare room; and the scent of the coffee penetrating
from the kitchen, where the two maids kept up a dumb but perpetual
warfare. Then afterwards Mary, emerging from her sun-bonnet, would be
tumbled into her white bed upstairs, and lie, a flushed image of sleep,
till the patter of her little feet on the boards which alone separated
one storey from the other, warned mother and nurse that an imp of
mischief was let loose again. Meanwhile Robert, in the carpetless
_salon_, would lie back in the rickety armchair which was its only
luxury, lazily dozing and dreaming, Balzac, perhaps, in his hand, but
quite another _comedie humaine_ unrolling itself vaguely meanwhile in
the contriving optimist mind.

Petites Dalles was not fashionable yet, though it aspired to be; but it
could boast of a deputy, and a senator, and a professor of the College
de France, as good as any at Etretat, a tired journalist or two, and a
sprinkling of Rouen men of business. Robert soon made friends among
them, _more suo_, by dint of a rough-and-ready French, spoken with the
most unblushing accent imaginable, and lounged along the sands through
many an amusing and sociable hour with one or other of his new
acquaintances.

But by the evening husband and wife would leave the crowded beach, and
mount by some tortuous