ches of Merton
and Buquay, and the space was covered now so thickly with human beings
that the sand was scarcely visible. It was a bright afternoon, hot but
tempered with a little breeze. The crowd bathed, paddled, screamed,
made sand-castles, lay sleeping, flirting, eating out of paper bags,
reading, quarrelling. Here were two niggers with banjoes, then a stout
lady with a harmonium, then a gentleman drawing pictures on the sand;
here again a man with sweets on a tray, here, just below Maggie, a
funny old woman with a little hut where ginger-beer and such things
were sold. The noise was deafening; the wind stirred the sand curiously
so that it blew up and about in little wreaths and spirals. Everything
and everybody seemed to be covered with the grit of this fine small
sand; it was in Maggie's eyes, nose, and mouth as she watched.

She hated the place--the station, the beach, the town, and the
woods--even more than she had done before. She hated the place--but she
loved the people.

The place was sneering, self-satisfied, contemptuous, inhuman, like
some cynical, debased speculator making a sure profit out of the
innocent weaknesses of human nature. As she turned and looked she could
see the whole ugly town with the spire of St. John's-Paul's church,
raised self-righteously above it.

The town was like a prison hemmed in by the dark woods and the oily
sea. She felt a sudden terrified consciousness of her own imprisonment.
It was perhaps from that moment that she began to be definitely unhappy
in her own life, that she realised with that sudden inspiration that is
given to us on occasion, how hostile Grace was becoming, how strange
and unreal was Paul, and how far away was every one else!

Just below her on the sand a happy family played-some babies, two
little boys digging, the father smoking, his hat tilted over his eyes
against the sun, the mother finding biscuits in a bag for the youngest
infant. It was a very merry family and full of laughter. The youngest
baby looked up and saw Maggie standing all alone there, and crowed.
Then all the family looked up, the boys suspended their digging, father
tilted back his hat, the mother shyly smiled.

Maggie smiled back, and then, overcome by so poignant a feeling of
loneliness, tempted, too, almost irresistibly to run down the steps,
join them on the sand, build castles, play with the babies, she hurried
away lest she should give way.

"I must be pretending at being ma