ely composed of windows of extravagant dimensions, beginning
below the cornice and stopping only a couple of feet above the floor, so
that as the two women sat by the wood fire they looked over their
shoulders at the leaning ships in the harbour and the tide that hurried
to it over the silver plain, and the little house with its orchard at
the island's end, not a stone's throw from the boats and nets, so marine
in its situation that one could conceive it farmed by a merman and see
him working his scaly tail up the straight path that drove through the
garden to the door, a sheep-fish wriggling at his heels. They saw too
the pastures of the rest of the island, of a rougher brine-qualified
green, and the one black tree that stood against them like the ace of
clubs; and past them lay the channel where the white sail of a frigate
curtseyed to the rust-red rag of a barge, and the round dark hills
beyond mothering a storm. And if they looked towards the window in the
right-hand wall they saw a line of elms going down the escarpment to the
marshes like women going down to a well; and between their slim purple
statures, the green floor of Kerith Island stretched illimitably to the
west. And everywhere there were colours, clear though unsunned, as if
the lens of the air had been washed very clean by the sea winds.

She had never before been in a room so freely ventilated by beauty, and
yet she knew that she would find living on the ledge of this view quite
intolerable. All that existed within the room was dwarfed by the
immensity that the glass let in upon it, like the private life of a man
dominated by some great general idea. Because the clouds were grey with
a load of rain and were running swiftly before an east wind the flesh
became inattentive to the heat of the fire and participated in the chill
of the open air, and though it is well to walk abroad on cold days, one
wants to be warm when one sits by the hearth. Behind the glass doors of
the bookcases were many books, with bindings that showed they were the
inaccessible sort, modern and right, that one cannot get out of the
public library. But one would never be able to sit and read with
concentration here, where if the eye strayed ever so little over the
margin it saw the river and the plain changing aspects at each change of
the wind like passionate people hearing news; yet there are discoveries
made by humanity that are as fair as the passage of a cloud-riving spot
of sunl