here could be no more looking at this brilliant and candid face of the
earth, because there was not anywhere so much force as in this squat,
stubborn body, clayish with middle-age.

Richard said: "No, she isn't crying. She isn't moving. I should feel a
fool if I went down and she didn't want me." And because his voice was
thin and husky like a nervous child's, and because he was answering a
question that she had not asked, Ellen was more afraid. This woman was
throwing over them a net of events as excessive as herself....

* * * * *

But these were only the things that one thought about life. As soon as
one stopped thinking about them they ceased to be. The world was not
really tragic. When he drew her back to the middle of the lawn where
they could not see Marion she was happy again, and hoped for pleasure,
and asked him if it were not possible to go boating on the estuary even
now, since the water looked so smooth. He answered that winter boating
was possible and had its own beauty, and told her, with an appreciation
that she had to concede was touched with frenzy in its emphasis, but
which she welcomed because it was an escape from worry, of a row he had
had one late December afternoon. He spoke of finding his way among white
oily creeks that wound among gleaming ebony mud-banks over which showed
the summits of the distant hills that had been skeletonised by a thin
snowfall; and of icy air that was made glamorous as one had thought only
warmth could be by the blended lights of the red sun on his left and the
primrose moon on the right. She leaped for joy at that, and asked him to
take her on the water soon, and he told her if she liked he would take
her down to Prittlebay and show her his motorboat which was lying up in
the boathouse of the Thamesmouth Yacht Club there.

Their ambulations had brought them to the orchard gate again, but he
turned on his heel and said, with what struck her as a curious
abandonment of the languor by which he usually asserted to the world
that he refused to hurry, "Go and put on your hat and we'll start at
once." So they went out and hastened through the buoyant air down to the
harbour and along the cinder-track to Prittlebay esplanade, where she
forgot everything in astonishment at the new, bright, arbitrary scene.
There was what seemed to her, a citizen of Edinburgh, a comically
unhistoric air about the place. The gaily-coloured rows of neat
dwellings