I'll watch the other women." He put out his hand and took
hers.

She felt his touch very cold. "You are excited I can see. I wish--"

"What? That I was not an intending dramatist?"

"That you didn't have such excitements in your life. They will kill
you."

"They are all that will keep me alive."

They went down to the beach, and walked back and forth on its curve
several times before they dropped in the sand at a discreet distance
from several groups of hotel acquaintance. People were coming and going
from the line of bath-houses that backed upon the low sand-bank behind
them, with its tufts of coarse silvery-green grasses. The Maxwells bowed
to some of the ladies who tripped gayly past them in their airy costumes
to the surf, or came up from it sobered and shivering. Four or five
young fellows, with sun-blackened arms and legs, were passing ball near
them. A pony-carriage drove by on the wet sand; a horseman on a
crop-tailed roan thumped after it at a hard trot. Dogs ran barking
vaguely about, and children with wooden shovels screamed at their play.
Far off shimmered the sea, of one pale blue with the sky. The rooks were
black at either end of the beach; a line of sail-boats and dories swung
across its crescent beyond the bathers, who bobbed up and down in the
surf, or showed a head here and there outside of it.

"What a singular spectacle," said Maxwell. "The casting off of the
conventional in sea-bathing always seems to me like the effect of those
dreams where we appear in society insufficiently dressed, and wonder
whether we can make it go."

"Yes, isn't it?" His wife tried to cover all the propositions with one
loosely fitting assent.

"I'm surprised," Maxwell went on, "that some realistic wretch hasn't put
this sort of thing on the stage. It would be tremendously effective; if
he made it realistic enough it would be attacked by the press as
improper and would fill the house. Couldn't we work a sea-bathing scene
into the 'Second Chapter'? It would make the fortune of the play, and it
would give Godolphin a chance to show his noble frame in something like
the majesty of nature. Godolphin would like nothing better. We could
have Atland rescue Salome, and Godolphin could flop round among the
canvas breakers for ten minutes, and come on for a recall with the
heroine, both dripping real water all over the stage."

"Don't be disgusting, Brice," said his wife, absently. She had her head
half turned from him, wa