But gradually he understood that, in the case of Laetitia, this analysis was wrong. He felt that the invisible barrier was not the result of inherited temperament and atavistic qualities and impulses, but due to the direct influence of the land itself—a land, he said to himself, which had the physical and spiritual attributes of Man; and he brooded on the thought until often, in his dreams, he felt like taking the land by the throat and throttling it as he would a man—a man who had stolen his wife's love.
As he walked through the village he imagined that there was laughter and mocking and enmity in the air—in the rustle of the trees, in the hot swing of the breeze, the dim stir of the dry beach grass, and the tinkling of the goat-bells.
He would have liked to ascribe it to some pathological disturbance, but he knew that he was perfectly sane—and so, early one afternoon in mid-summer, he spoke of it to his wife.
He tried to speak of it jestingly, like a man burdened by a conviction as certain as fate, and burdened, too, by the other conviction that confession and utterance would bring disbelief and stark, gaping ridicule; and so he was shocked—shocked and
