g to comfort itself for its fall. Above the
splashing and the little hushing draw, the church bells sounded from
Baja, calling the bay to Mass. There was half an hour still for
absorbing contentment on the warm sand.

To the right the castle blocked the blue sky, shutting the little bay.
Across the wide waters to the east Pozzuoli loomed, transparent, jutting
into the sea. Further, more transparent, delicately purple, Nisida
seemed moored like a barge, with the point of Coroglio behind it.
Coroglio shut the gulf, so that one could not see how behind it the bay
swept down and ran to Naples. Naples was beyond the picture; the picture
held only the blue January morning, with its glittering waters and brown
sails and purple points and islands, and little waves that spurtled on
warm sand, and behind the bells of Baja calling. There was also the salt
smell of the sea, and the Crevequers, and their sand castle. These
things, to Betty Crevequer, became suddenly, as Mrs. Venables would have
said, very real, very vivid--in a manner all of life. She lay dreamily,
her eyes narrowed to slits blue as the sea, absorbing the impression.
Worded--but she did not word it now--it was, as she had put it, 'Naples
is there, and you and I are out here.' Naples, set pink and white upon
her shores, beyond the point, out of the picture, was life; and life,
some one had said, was a smelting-furnace, a testing of ultimate values.
Betty seemed to dream a dream--a dream of the testing of values by fire.
She saw how it might be that metal ran away, melting in the flames ...
how one might be cast up out of the fiery pit, taking with one the
knowledge of pure gold, for what that wisdom might be worth. But perhaps
also a little piece of it to keep--if one was fortunate.

And Betty shuddered at this vision of purging by fire, and at the
'mental standpoint' of the man who had conceived life so. One should be
allowed to keep one's bright metal--gold or dross, it mattered little;
one should be allowed to keep it to play with, not looking into its
quality avariciously. There should be a ring set round it to guard it
from the flames which might melt it away in one's hands. The melting of
it would so horribly burn one's hands; and then there would be a
blankness, and nothing left to play with any more.

It was at this moment that the 'impression' became of a great vividness.
Life might be a furnace, but here were things untouched by its flame,
cast up--so Bet