ish the pans"--she laughed--"and when I scour my
buckles, I just think of pans and buckles." She tossed up her fingers
lightly, with a perfect charm of archness.

He was very close to her now. "But girls have dreams, they have
memories."

"If women hadn't memory," she answered, "they wouldn't have much, would
they? We can't take cities and manoeuvre fleets." She laughed a little
ironically. "I wonder that we think at all or have anything to think
about, except the kitchen and the garden, and baking and scouring and
spinning"--she paused slightly, her voice lowered a little--"and
the sea, and the work that men do round us.... Do you ever go into a
market?" she added suddenly.

Somehow she could talk easily and naturally to him. There had been no
leading up to confidence. She felt a sudden impulse to tell him all
her thoughts. To know things, to understand, was a passion with her. It
seemed to obliterate in her all that was conventional, it removed her
far from sensitive egotism. Already she had begun "to take notice" in
the world, and that is like being born again. As it grows, life ceases
to be cliche; and when the taking notice is supreme we call it genius;
and genius is simple and believing: it has no pride, it is naive, it is
childlike.

Philip seemed to wear no mark of convention, and Guida spoke her
thoughts freely to him. "To go into a market seems to me so wonderful,"
she continued. "There are the cattle, the fruits, the vegetables, the
flowers, the fish, the wood; the linen from the loom, the clothes that
women's fingers have knitted. But it isn't just those things that you
see, it's all that's behind them--the houses, the fields, and the boats
at sea, and the men and women working and working, and sleeping and
eating, and breaking their hearts with misery, and wondering what is to
be the end of it all; yet praying a little, it may be, and dreaming a
little--perhaps a very little." She sighed, and continued: "That's as
far as I get with thinking. What else can one do in this little island?
Why, on the globe Maitre Damian has at St. Aubin's, Jersey is no bigger
than the head of a pin. And what should one think of here?"

Her eyes were on the sea. Its mystery was in them, the distance, the ebb
and flow, the light of wonder and of adventure too. "You--you've been
everywhere," she went on. "Do you remember you sent me once from Malta a
tiny silver cross? That was years ago, soon after the Battle of Jersey,
whe