"

Vashti looked up with a quick smile. "He told you?... I am so glad!
Yes, yes: I did not in the least want to have all those passengers
crowding around me and paying me ridiculous compliments. But false
modesty is another thing altogether, and I don't mind telling you I am
quite inordinately proud of myself."

"You have a right to be."

"--as I don't mind confessing that I was horribly afraid at the time.
But I am glad again, that Captain Whitaker told you. It was pretty
good--eh?--after fifteen years."

She asked it frankly; not archly at all, but with a sudden earnest look
that seemed to hold some sadness; and before the Commandant could reply
this sadness grew and became so real that he wondered at his having
doubted it at first glance.

"Fifteen years!" she went on. "We all have a quarrel against time, we
men and women, but on grounds so different that a man scarcely
understands a woman's grievance nor a woman a man's. With you it all
rests in your work. Fifteen years knock holes in your fortifications,
tumble your guns into the sea, send along a new generation of men to
pull down what you have built, to rebuild in a flurry of haste, and see
their work in its turn criticised and condemned by yet a new company of
builders. At this we women only look on and marvel. Why all this fuss,
we ask, over what you do? Why all this hopeful, hopeless craving to
leave something permanent? The Islands, here, will outlast anything you
can build. I come back after fifteen years, and they are unchanged;
they would be unchanged were I to come back after a hundred. The same
rocks, the same bracken, the same hum of the tides; the same flowers;
the same blue here, below us, the same outline of a spear-head there,
beyond St. Ann's, where the tide forces through the slack water; the
same streak of yellow yonder on the south cliffs of Saaron.... Our
grievance is more personal, more real ... and so should yours be, if
you could only see it. It is to ourselves--to you and me, to any man
and woman--that time makes the difference. You worry over your
fortifications. Why? It is in ourselves that the tragedy lies. To lose
our looks, our voice--to grow old and mumble--" She broke off with a
shiver.

The Commandant smiled sadly. He had too much sense to pay an idle
compliment. "If that be the tragedy, Miss Vashti," said he, "then we
are wise in our folly, which bids us rest our hopes in our work though
its permanence be all an illusion. W