o longer pined for London; was never
sentimental towards eight o'clock; and certainly could not be supposed
to exist in an atmosphere of regret. At the same time, she could not be
said to have settled down, because her husband was perpetually an
intrusion on any final serenity. She could not bear the way he ate, the
grit and soil and raggedness of his face; she loathed the grimy scars
upon his hands, his smell of corduroy. She hated his mental outlook, his
pre-occupation with hell, his narrow pride, and lack of humor, his
pricking avarice and mean vanity, his moral cowardice and religious
bravery, his grossness and cunning and boastfulness and cruelty to
animals. She feared the storms that would one day arise between him and
his son. She felt even now the clashing of the two hostile temperaments:
already there were signs of future struggles, and it was not just a
fancy that young Frank was always peevish at his father's approach.

The equinox sank asleep to an April lullaby. Lambs bleated on the
storm-washed air. The ocean plumed itself like a mating bird. Then
followed three weeks of gray weather and much restlessness on the part
of young Frank, who cried and fumed and was very naughty indeed. What
with Frank and the southeast wind and the cold rain, Jenny's nerves
suffered, and when May morning broke in a dazzle, she thought it would
be a good plan to leave young Frank with Granfa, and in May's company to
go for a long walk. May was delighted and together they set out.

They followed the path of the valley past the groves of arbutus, past
the emerald meadows down into the sandy waste over which the stream
carried little pebbles to the sea, flowing over the wide shallows like a
diamonded lattice. They plunged in the towans that never seemed to
change with the seasons. They rested in the warm hollows under larksong.
They climbed precipices and ran along ridges, until at last they raced
gloriously down a virgin drift out on to the virgin sands on which, a
long way off, the waves were breaking in slow curves, above them a film
of spray tossed backwards by the breeze blowing from the shore.

Jenny sat in the solitude, making a necklace of wine-stained shells. She
was dressed in some shade of fawn that seemed to be absorbed by these
wide flat sands, so that she became smaller and slighter. She wore a
silver-gray bonnet set closely round her cheeks in a ruching of ivory.
May was in scarlet and looked, as she lay there in th