n the canvas of that pale day.

Anonyma perpetuated in her notebook her opinion of Nature as an artist.
On the whole, it was a flattering opinion. Then she sat on the
breakwater, and thought how fortunate she was to be able to think such
interesting thoughts about what she saw. How fortunate to enjoy thought
and to cause thought! How fortunate to feel oneself a member of the
comforting fellowship of intelligence! "It is much more delightful,"
Anonyma informed the sea, "to be intelligent than to be beautiful. Why do
we all try to make our outsides beautiful? There is competition in
beauty, but there is brotherhood in intelligence. To be clever is to
share a secret and a smile with all clever people." A vision of the coast
of the United Kingdom encircled by a ring of consciously clever Anonymas
sitting on breakwaters, sharing each with all a secret and a smile, came
vaguely to her.

She put all that she could of her soliloquy into her notebook.

And then she noticed the face of a man, with its eyes upon her,
appearing stealthily over a breakwater. The face wore the grin that some
people wear when they are doing anything with great caution. This gave it
a very empty, bright expression, like the mask that represents comedy in
a theatre decoration. The face dropped down behind the breakwater, after
meeting Anonyma's surprised eye for a second or two.

Anonyma kept her head.

First she thought it was the face of a bather, the path to whose clothes
she was unwittingly barring.

Then she thought it was the face of a picnicker, resentful of her
intrusion.

Then she thought it was the face of a German spy.

The first two of these three thoughts she rejected because the weather
reduced their possibility to a minimum. The third she instinctively
adopted as a certainty. The face at once became obviously German in her
eyes. It was broader about the chin than about the forehead, it was pink,
the architecture of the nose was painfully un-English.

She scanned the sea for the periscope of a submarine.

Anonyma remembered that she had written in her notebook, a day or two
before, an intimate description of the coast as seen from the Ring. She
also remembered distinctly seeing in the bar of the inn a notice warning
her to the effect that walls--and probably breakwaters--have ears and
eyes in these days, and that the German Government has a persistent wish
to possess itself of private diaries and notebooks.

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