under the great rocks of her Mediterranean villa
in the motionless white evenings of summer put white roses in her hair,
and liked to sit out on a rock at sea where the first rays of the moon
would touch her.

You bathe in the Channel in the very prose of the day. Nothing in the
world is more uninteresting than eleven o'clock. It is the hour of
mediocrity under the best conditions; but eleven o'clock on a shingly
beach, in a half-hearted summer, is a very common thing. Twelve has a
dignity always, and everywhere its name is great. The noon of every day
that ever dawned is in its place heroic; but eleven is worldly. One
o'clock has an honest human interest to the hungry child, and every hour
of the summer afternoon, after three, has the grace of deepening and
lingering life. To bathe at eleven in the sun, in the wind, to bathe
from a machine, in a narrow sea that is certainly not clear and is only
by courtesy clean, to bathe in obedience to a tyrannical tide and in
water that is always much colder than yourself, to bathe in a hurry and
in public--this is to know nothing rightly of one of the greatest of all
the pleasures that humanity takes with nature.

By the way, the sea of Jersey has more the character of a real sea than
of mere straits. These temperate islands would be better called the
Ocean Islands. When Edouard Pailleron was a boy and wrote poetry, he
composed a letter to Victor Hugo, the address whereof was a matter of
some thought. The final decision was to direct it, "A Victor Hugo,
Ocean." It reached him. It even received a reply: "I am the Past, you
are the Future; I am, etc." If an English boy had had the same idea the
name of the Channel Islands would have spoilt it. "A Victor Hugo, La
Manche," would hardly have interested the postal authorities so much; but
"the Channel" would have had no respect at all. Indeed, this last is
suggestive of nothing but steamers and of grey skies inland--formless
grey skies, undesigned, with their thin cloud torn to slender rags by a
perpetual wind.

As for the children, to whom belongs the margin of the sea,
machine-bathing at eleven o'clock will hardly furnish them with a magical
early memory. Time was when this was made penitential to them, like the
rest of life, upon a principle that no longer prevails. It was
vulgarized for them and made violent. A bathing woman, type of all
ugliness in their sensitive eyes, came striding, shapeless, through the
unf