akeful.
Very certainly she loved Barry, with all her imagination and all her
mind, and she would have given him more than all that was hers. Very
surely and truly she loved him, even if after all he was to be her uncle
by marriage, which would make their family life like that in one of Louis
Couperus's books. But why unhappy like that? Was love unhappy? If she
might see him sometimes, talk to him, if Nan wouldn't want all of him all
the time--and it would be unlike Nan to do that--she could be happy. One
could share, after all. Women must share, for there were a million more
women in England than men.

But probably Nan didn't mean to marry him at all. Nan never married
people....

8

Next morning at the office Barry said he had heard from Nan. She had
asked him to come too and bicycle in Cornwall, with her and Gerda and
Kay.

"You will, won't you," said Gerda.

"Rather, of course."

A vaguely puzzled note sounded in his voice. But he would come.

Cornwall was illuminated to Gerda. The sharing process would begin there.
But for a week more she had him to herself, and that was better.

CHAPTER VIII

NAN

1

Nan at Marazion bathed, sailed, climbed, walked and finished her book.
She had a room at St. Michael's Cafe, at the edge of the little town,
just above the beach. Across a space of sea at high tide, and of wet
sand and a paved causeway slimy with seaweed at the ebb, St. Michael's
Mount loomed, dark against a sunset sky, pale and unearthly in the dawn,
an embattled ship riding anchored on full waters, or stranded on drowned
sands.

Nan stayed at the empty little town to be alone. But she was not alone
all the time, for at Newlyn, five miles away, there was the artist
colony, and some of these artists were her friends. (In point of fact, it
is impossible to be alone in Cornwall; the place to go to for that would
be Hackney, or some other district of outer London, where inner Londoners
do not go for holidays.) Had she liked she could have had friends to play
with all day, and talk and laughter and music all night, as in London.
She did not like. She went out by herself, worked by herself; and all the
time, in company, or alone, talking or working, she knew herself
withdrawn really into a secret cove of her own which was warm and golden
as no actual coves in this chill summer were warm and golden; a cove on
whose good brown sand she lay and made castles and played, while at her
feet the great ha