denote admiration. Pretty little girls often
make this error.

Stephen Lumley came along the beach. It was lunch time, and after lunch
they were going out sailing. Stephen Lumley was the most important artist
just now in Newlyn. He had been in love with Nan for some months, and did
not get on with his wife. Nan liked him; he painted brilliantly, and was
an attractive, clever, sardonic person. Sailing with him was fun. They
understood each other; they had rather the same cynical twist to them.
They understood each other really better than Nan and Barry did. Neither
of them needed to make any effort to comprehend each other's point of
view. And each left the other where he was. Whereas Barry filled Nan,
beneath her cynicism, beneath her levity, with something quite new--a
queer desire, to put it simply, for goodness, for straight living and
generous thinking, even, within reason, for usefulness. More and more he
flooded her inmost being, drowning the old landmarks, like the sea at
high tide. Nan was not a Christian, did not believe in God, but she came
near at this time to believing in Christianity as possibly a fine and
adventurous thing to live.

3

Echoes of the great little world so far off came to the Cornish coasts,
through the Western Mercury and the stray, belated London papers. Rumours
of a projected coal strike, of fighting in Mesopotamia, of political
prisoners on hunger strike, of massacres in Ireland, and typists murdered
at watering-places; echoes of Fleet Street quarrels, of Bolshevik gold
("Not a bond! Not a franc! Not a rouble!") and, from the religious
world, of fallen man and New Faiths for Old. And on Sundays one bought a
paper which had for its special star comic turn the reminiscences of the
expansive wife of one of our more patient politicians. The world went on
just the same, quarrelling, chattering, lying; sentimental, busy and
richly absurd; its denizens tilting against each other's politics,
murdering each other, trying and always failing to swim across the
channel, and always talking, talking, talking. Marazion and Newlyn, and
every other place were the world in little, doing all the same things in
their own miniature way. Each human soul was the world in little, with
all the same conflicts, hopes, emotions, excitements and intrigues. But
Nan, swimming, sailing, eating, writing, walking and lounging, browning
in salt winds and waters, was happy and remote, like a savage on an
island who m