a preposterous and
vague idea that still, however, led him till he reached the esplanade,
and stood with the sea wind blowing in his face.

The only sailing boats visible were excursion craft, guarded by
longshoremen, loading up with trippers, and showing placards to allure
the innocent.

The sands were swarming, and the bathing machines crawling towards the
sea.

He came on to the beach and took his seat on the warm, white sands, with
freedom before him had he been a gull or a fish. To take one of those
cockleshell row boats and scull a few miles down the coast would lead
him where? Only along the coast, rock-strewn beyond the sands and faced
with cliffs. Of boat craft he had no knowledge, the sea was choppy, and
the sailing boats now out seemed going like race horses over hurdles.

No, he would wait till after luncheon, then in that somnolent hour when
all men's thoughts are a bit dulled, and vigilance least awake, he would
find some road, on good hard land, and make his dash.

He would try and get a bicycle map of this part of Wessex. He had
noticed a big stationers' and book-sellers' near the beach, and he would
call there on his way back.

Then he fell to reading his paper, smoking cigarettes, and watching the
crowd.

Watching, he was presently rewarded with the sight of the present day
disgrace of England. Out of a bathing tent, and into the full sunlight,
came a girl with nothing on, for skin tight blue stockinette is nothing
in the eyes of Modesty; every elevation, every depression, every crease
in her shameless anatomy exposed to a hundred pairs of eyes, she walked
calmly towards the water. A young man to match followed. Then they
wallowed in the sea.

Jones forgot Hoover. He recalled Lady Dolly in "Moths"--Lady Dolly, who,
on the beach of Sandbourne-on-Sea would have been the pink of
propriety, and the inhabitants of this beach were not wicked society
people, but respectable middle class folk.

"That's pretty thick," said Jones to an old gentleman like a goat
sitting close to him, whose eyes were fixed in contemplation on the
bathers.

"What?"

"That girl in blue. Don't any of them wear decent clothes?"

"The scraggy ones do," replied the other, speaking in a far away and
contented manner.

At about half past eleven Jones left the beach, tired of the glare and
the bathers, and the sand digging children. He called at the book shop,
and for a shilling obtained a bicycle map of the coast, and si