“Barry’s and mine,” she thought (I suppose we’ll have some), “shall at least not pose.  They may break all the commandments, but if they turn somersaults to be looked at I shall drop them into a public creche and abandon them.”

The prettiest little girl looked sidelong at the unkind lady, and believed her half-smile to denote admiration.  Pretty little girls often make this error.

Stephen Lumley came along the beach.  It was lunch time, and after lunch they were going out sailing.  Stephen Lumley was the most important artist just now in Newlyn.  He had been in love with Nan for some months, and did not get on with his wife.  Nan liked him; he painted brilliantly, and was an attractive, clever, sardonic person.  Sailing with him was fun.  They understood each other; they had rather the same cynical twist to them.  They understood each other really better than Nan and Barry did.  Neither of them needed to make any effort to comprehend each other’s point of view.  And each left the other where he was.  Whereas Barry filled Nan, beneath her cynicism, beneath her levity, with something quite new—­a queer desire, to put it simply, for goodness, for straight living and generous thinking, even, within reason, for usefulness.  More and more he flooded her inmost being, drowning the old landmarks, like the sea at high tide.  Nan was not a Christian, did not believe in God, but she came near at this time to believing in Christianity as possibly a fine and adventurous thing to live.

3

Echoes of the great little world so far off came to the Cornish coasts, through the Western Mercury and the stray, belated London papers.  Rumours of a projected coal strike, of fighting in Mesopotamia, of political prisoners on hunger strike, of massacres in Ireland, and typists murdered at watering-places; echoes of Fleet Street quarrels, of Bolshevik gold ("Not a bond!  Not a franc!  Not a rouble!”) and, from the religious world, of fallen man and New Faiths for Old.  And on Sundays one bought a paper which had for its special star comic turn the reminiscences of the expansive wife of one of our more patient politicians.  The world went on just the same, quarrelling, chattering, lying; sentimental, busy and richly absurd; its denizens tilting against each other’s politics, murdering each other, trying and always failing to swim across the channel, and always talking, talking, talking.  Marazion and Newlyn, and every other place were the world in little, doing all the same things in their own miniature way.  Each human soul was the world in little, with all the same conflicts, hopes, emotions, excitements and intrigues.  But Nan, swimming, sailing, eating, writing, walking and lounging, browning in salt winds and waters, was happy and remote, like a savage on an island who meditates exclusively on his own affairs.

4

Nan met them at Penzance station.  The happy three; they would be good to make holiday with.  Already they had holiday faces, though not yet browned like Nan’s.