was about to turn back when her eye caught a strange
appearance on the sea, hundreds and hundreds of moving points drawing in
to the shore, white and black points like a shoal of fish only half
submerged. It was a fleet of swimming birds.

She sat down on the sand to watch as they took the shore with a rush
through the foam. Then, safely beached, the fleet became an army of
penguins. She had seen pictures of penguins so she knew what they were
and she had read Anatole France's "Penquin Island"--these, then, were
the real things and she watched them fascinated as one who sees
storyland taking visible and concrete form.

The penguins formed line, broke into companies, drilled a bit and then
began to move up the beach.

The figure of the girl did not seem to disturb them in the least.

One company passed to the left, one to the right, whilst that
immediately fronting her halted a few feet away and saluted her, bowing
like little old-fashioned men in black swallow-tail coats and immaculate
shirt fronts, little old-fashioned men with sharp quizzical eyes,
polished, humorous, polite and entirely friendly.

The company on the right wheeled to examine her as did the company on
the left, so that she found herself almost in a hollow square. Wherever
she turned there were birds bowing to her or things in the semblance of
birds, absolutely fearless, so close that she could have touched them
had she carried a walking-stick.

She rose up to allow them to pass and they went on like mechanical
things wound up and released, forming line again and seeming to forget
her.

She remembered the guillemots and their rudeness and the way they had
stormed and jeered at the boat--did all that mean more than the
politeness and friendliness of the penguins? If she were lying dead
would not the guillemots pass her without enmity and the penguins
without friendliness, as indifferent to her fate as the wave of the sea
on the blowing wind?

They would--as indifferent as the great islands standing out there in
the distance, mauve and slate grey against the morning. As she came back
along the beach her mind was battling with a problem that had suddenly
risen. She had neither brush nor comb nor glass. Her hair was beautiful
and she loved it. Her face was beautiful but she did not love it, it was
herself, she could not view it from an independent standpoint, but she
could view her hair almost as impartially as a dress and she loved it
with the st