use Rosalind was so malicious.

"You wonderful woman! I can't think how you _do_ it," Rosalind was crying
to her in her rich, ripe voice out of the splashing waves. "But fancy
their all swimming out and leaving you to yourself. Why, you might get
cramp and sink. _I'm_ no use, you know; I'm hopeless; can't keep up at
all."

"I shan't trouble you, thank you," Mrs. Hilary called back, and her voice
shook a little because she was getting chilled.

"Why, you're shivering," Rosalind cried. "Why don't you come out? You
_are_ wonderful, I do admire you.... It's no use waiting for the others,
they'll be ages.... I say, look at Neville; fancy her being forty-three.
I never knew such a family.... Come and sit in the waves with me, it's
lovely and warm."

"I prefer swimming," said Mrs. Hilary, and she was shivering more now.
She never stayed in so long as this; she usually only plunged in and came
out.

Grandmama, stopping on the esplanade in her donkey chair, was waving and
beckoning to her. Grandmama knew she had been in too long, and that her
rheumatism would be bad.

"_Come out, dear_," Grandmama called, in her old thin voice. "_Come out.
You've been in far too long._"

Mrs. Hilary only waved her hand to Grandmama. She was not going to come
out, like an old woman, before the others did, the others, who had swum
out and left her alone on her birthday bathe.

They were swimming back now, first all in a row, then one behind the
other; Neville leading, with her arrowy drive, Gilbert and Pamela behind,
so alike, with their pale, finely cut, intellectual faces, and their
sharp chins cutting through the sea, and their quick, short, vigorous
strokes, and Nan, still far out, swimming lazily on her back, the sun
in her eyes.

Mrs. Hilary's heart stirred to see her swimming brood, so graceful and
strong and swift and young. They possessed, surely, everything that was
in the heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water over the
earth. And she, who was sixty-three, possessed nothing. She could not
even swim with her children. They might have thought of that, and stayed
with her.... Neville, anyhow. Jim would have, said Mrs. Hilary to
herself, half knowing and half not knowing that she was lying.

"_Come out, dear!_" called Grandmama from the esplanade. "_You'll be
ill!_"

Back they came, Neville first. Neville, seeing from afar her mother's
blue face, called "Mother dear, how cold you are! You shouldn't have
stayed in