I go across to happier
regions."

"So long as you don't make a great row going, and don't try the wrong
door," said the other man, turning in to sleep.

Skrebensky went out in his wide-striped sleeping suit. He crossed the big
dining hall, whose low firelight smelled of cigars and whisky and coffee,
entered the other corridor and found Ursula's room. She was lying awake,
wide-eyed and suffering. She was glad he had come, if only for
consolation. It was consolation to be held in his arms, to feel his body
against hers. Yet how foreign his arms and body were! Yet still, not so
horribly foreign and hostile as the rest of the house felt to her.

She did not know how she suffered in this house. She was
healthy and exorbitantly full of interest. So she played tennis
and learned golf, she rowed out and swam in the deep sea, and
enjoyed it very much indeed, full of zest. Yet all the time,
among those others, she felt shocked and wincing, as if her
violently-sensitive nakedness were exposed to the hard, brutal,
material impact of the rest of the people.

The days went by unmarked, in a full, almost strenuous
enjoyment of one's own physique. Skrebensky was one among the
others, till evening came, and he took her for himself. She was
allowed a great deal of freedom and was treated with a good deal
of respect, as a girl on the eve of marriage, about to depart
for another continent.

The trouble began at evening. Then a yearning for something
unknown came over her, a passion for something she knew not
what. She would walk the foreshore alone after dusk, expecting,
expecting something, as if she had gone to a rendezvous. The
salt, bitter passion of the sea, its indifference to the earth,
its swinging, definite motion, its strength, its attack, and its
salt burning, seemed to provoke her to a pitch of madness,
tantalizing her with vast suggestions of fulfilment. And then,
for personification, would come Skrebensky, Skrebensky, whom she
knew, whom she was fond of, who was attractive, but whose soul
could not contain her in its waves of strength, nor his breast
compel her in burning, salty passion.

One evening they went out after dinner, across the low golf
links to the dunes and the sea. The sky had small, faint stars,
all was still and faintly dark. They walked together in silence,
then ploughed, labouring, through the heavy loose sand of the
gap between the dunes. They went in silence under the even,
faint darkness, in the