or other with _her_--while they sat together, when time and
freedom served, on one of the very last, the far westward, benches
of the interminable sea-front. It wasn't every one who walked so far,
especially at that flat season--the only ghost of a bustle now, save for
the gregarious, the obstreperous haunters of the fluttering, far-shining
Pier, being reserved for the sunny Parade of midwinter. It wasn't every
one who cared for the sunsets (which you got awfully well from there
and which were a particular strong point of the lower, the more
"sympathetic," as Herbert Dodd liked to call it, Properley horizon) as
he had always intensely cared, and as he had found Nan Drury care; to
say nothing of his having also observed how little they directly spoke
to Miss Cookham. He had taught this oppressive companion to notice
them a bit, as he had taught her plenty of other things, but that was
a different matter; for the reason that the "land's end" (stretching a
point it carried off that name) had been, and had had to be, by their
lack of more sequestered resorts and conveniences, the scene of so much
of what she styled their wooing-time--or, to put it more properly, of
the time during which she had made the straightest and most unabashed
love to _him_: just as it could henceforth but render possible, under
an equal rigour, that he should enjoy there periods of consolation from
beautiful, gentle, tender-souled Nan, to whom he was now at last, after
the wonderful way they had helped each other to behave, going to make
love, absolutely unreserved and abandoned, absolutely reckless and
romantic love, a refuge from poisonous reality, as hard as ever he
might.

The league-long, paved, lighted, garden-plotted, seated and refuged
Marina renounced its more or less celebrated attractions to break off
short here; and an inward curve of the kindly westward shore almost made
a wide-armed bay, with all the ugliness between town and country, and
the further casual fringe of the coast, turning, as the day waned, to
rich afternoon blooms of grey and brown and distant--it might fairly
have been beautiful Hampshire--blue. Here it was that, all that blighted
summer, with Nan--from the dreadful May-day on--he gave himself up to
the reaction of intimacy with the _kind_ of woman, at least, that he
liked; even if of everything else that might make life possible he was
to be, by what he could make out, forever starved. Here it was that--as
well as on