"You should not be a snob," he teased. "After all, you are marrying the son of peasants."
"Peasants are different," she insisted, a little sulkily.
"Peasants are picturesque only in books, my dear. As for me, I like happy people, and even your English 'noisy and vulgar' ones are happy, I suppose, when they come up here on Sunday. Some day you and I will come again. And bring Théo," he added suddenly.
Then he rose. "Come, we had better start to walk back." She obeyed in silence.
"If I had not had genius," he continued as they reached the bottom of the slope and turned homewards, "I should be now—what? A Norman peasant in a black blouse driving, probably, a char-à-bancs to sell my fruit—or my corn. I could never have been a gamekeeper like my father, for I cannot kill. And if you, then, had come to Falaise and gone to the market, you might have bought a pennyworth of cherries of me. And all this might have been if I had not, one day, heard an old half-witted blind man play a cracked fiddle on the high road, thirty years ago!"
She frowned, for she hated this kind of talk. It was too true, and it hurt her baser pride, even while her nobler pride rejoiced in the very humbleness of his origin because it emphasised his present greatness.
"But—you are you, and I am only—me," she returned, ungrammatical but proudly humble.
He turned, his face flushing brilliantly. "Then you are proud of me?" he cried.
Danger again. After a long pause, which visibly hurt him, she returned with a smile, "Of course I am. Who would not be proud of such a father-in-law?"
Half an hour later it was all over, the wonderful day was finished, and to Brigit's amazement she was more than a little glad. It had been delightful, but it had been full of danger.