a big white pebble on the beach, not much more
than a clot of foam being blown and rolled over the sand," he said to
himself.

She seemed to move very slowly across the vast sounding shore. As he
watched, he lost her. She was dazzled out of sight by the sunshine.
Again he saw her, the merest white speck moving against the white,
muttering sea-edge.

"Look how little she is!" he said to himself. "She's lost like a grain
of sand in the beach--just a concentrated speck blown along, a tiny
white foam-bubble, almost nothing among the morning. Why does she absorb
me?"

The morning was altogether uninterrupted: she was gone in the water. Far
and wide the beach, the sandhills with their blue marrain, the shining
water, glowed together in immense, unbroken solitude.

"What is she, after all?" he said to himself. "Here's the seacoast
morning, big and permanent and beautiful; there is she, fretting, always
unsatisfied, and temporary as a bubble of foam. What does she mean
to me, after all? She represents something, like a bubble of foam
represents the sea. But what is she? It's not her I care for."

Then, startled by his own unconscious thoughts, that seemed to speak so
distinctly that all the morning could hear, he undressed and ran quickly
down the sands. She was watching for him. Her arm flashed up to him, she
heaved on a wave, subsided, her shoulders in a pool of liquid silver.
He jumped through the breakers, and in a moment her hand was on his
shoulder.

He was a poor swimmer, and could not stay long in the water. She played
round him in triumph, sporting with her superiority, which he begrudged
her. The sunshine stood deep and fine on the water. They laughed in the
sea for a minute or two, then raced each other back to the sandhills.

When they were drying themselves, panting heavily, he watched her
laughing, breathless face, her bright shoulders, her breasts that swayed
and made him frightened as she rubbed them, and he thought again:

"But she is magnificent, and even bigger than the morning and the sea.
Is she--? Is she--"

She, seeing his dark eyes fixed on her, broke off from her drying with a
laugh.

"What are you looking at?" she said.

"You," he answered, laughing.

Her eyes met his, and in a moment he was kissing her white
"goose-fleshed" shoulder, and thinking:

"What is she? What is she?"

She loved him in the morning. There was something detached, hard, and
elemental about his kisses then, as i