ecorum, the well-lighted streets of a town became to her
vaguely dangerous and indecorous after dusk had fallen. "It wouldn't be
seemly," she repeated to herself in the loneliness and dullness of the
lounge, and went desperately to bed.

However, three nights before going away she could bear it no longer.
After a warm April day, a purple starry evening hung over the sea. The
water itself was a deep, glaucous gray, holding strange lights besides
the golden path of the moon. Beachy Head stood out purple against the
fading amber of the west, in the east All Holland Hill was hung with a
crown of stars, which seemed to be mirrored in the lights of the
fisher-boats off Rock-a-Nore.... It was impossible to think of such an
evening spent in the stuffy, lonely lounge, with heavy curtains shutting
out the opal and the amethyst of night.

She had not had time to dress for dinner, having come home late from a
charabanc drive to Pevensey, and the circumstance seemed slightly to
mitigate the daring of a stroll. In her neat tailor-made coat and skirt
and black hat with the cock's plumes she might perhaps walk to and fro
just a little in front of the hotel. She went out, and was a trifle
reassured by the light which still lingered in the sky and on the
sea--it was not quite dark yet, and there was a respectable-looking lot
of people about--she recognized a lady staying in the hotel, and would
have joined her, but the lady, whom she had already scared, saw her
coming, and dodged off in the direction of the Marine Gardens.

The band began to play a waltz from "A Persian Princess." Joanna felt
once more in her blood the strange stir of the music she could not
understand. It would be nice to dance ... queer that she had so seldom
danced as a girl. She stood for a moment irresolute, then walked towards
the bandstand, and sat down on one of the corporation benches, outside
the crowd that had grouped round the musicians. It was very much the
same sort of crowd as in the morning, but it was less covert in its
ways--hands were linked, even here and there waists entwined.... Such
details began to stand out of the dim, purplescent mass of the twilight
people ... night was the time for love. They had come out into the
darkness to make love to each other--their voices sounded different from
in the day, more dragging, more tender....

She began to think of the times, which now seemed so far off, when she
herself had sought a man's kisses. Half-as