a. I would go and look at all that
later on after my bathe. If there is a thing I love it is exploring the
little paths of an unknown wood, finding out the corners where it keeps
its periwinkles and anemones, discovering its birds' nests, waiting
motionless for its hedgehogs and squirrels, and even searching out those
luscious recesses, oozy and green, where it keeps its happy slugs. They
tell me slugs are not really happy, that Nature is cruel, and that you
only have to scratch the pleasant surface of things to get at once to
blood-curdling brutalities. Perhaps if you were to go on scratching you
might get to consolations and beneficiencies again; but why scratch at
all? Why not take the beauty and be grateful? I will not scratch. I will
not criticise my own mother who has sheltered me so long in her broad
bosom, and been so long my surest guide to all that is gentle and
lovely. Whatever she does, from thunderbolts to headaches, I will not
criticise; for if she gives me a headache, is there not pleasure when it
leaves off? And if she hurls a thunderbolt at me and I am unexpectedly
exterminated, my body shall serve as a basis for fresh life and growth,
and shall blossom out presently into an immortality of daisies.

I think I must have slept, for the sound of the waves grew very far
away, and I only seemed to have been watching the sun on them for a few
minutes, when Gertrud's voice floated across space to my ears; and she
was saying it was past four, and that one lady had already gone down to
bathe, and that, as there were only two cells, if I did not go soon I
might not get a bathe at all. I sat up in my hollow and looked across to
the huts. The bathing woman in the usual white calico sunbonnet was
there, waiting on the plank bridge. No one was in the sea yet. It was a
great bore that there should be any one else bathing just then, for
German female tourists are apt to be extraordinarily cordial in the
water. On land, laced into suppressive whalebone, dressed, and with
their hair dry and curled, they cannot but keep within the limits set by
convention; but the more clothes they take off the more do they seem to
consider the last barrier between human creature and human creature
broken down, and they will behave towards you, meeting you on this
common ground of wateriness, as though they had known you and
extravagantly esteemed you for years. Their cordiality, too, becomes
more pronounced in proportion to the coldness a