"It's absolutely perfect. God,—weaving worlds because He is lonely."
"No. It's not mine, I'd give a good deal to be able to claim it, but it belongs to one Arthur Symons. Do you know his stuff?"
"No. Is it all like that?—'Weaving worlds out of loneliness.'"
"Not all. But he saw rather far into the heart of things." Without further comment Herrick began to quote—whole poems, fragments, single lines. It was all sad and beautiful and sensuous, filled with the hunger of soul and body.
His voice took on a depth it did not have in usual speech. It fitted perfectly with the sad booming of the surf and the whimper of the little waves that ran in terror among the rocks. For the first time in her life Jean felt the ache of physical beauty. She wanted to cry.
Toward sundown the wind died, the high fog parted and the sun sank in a wine-red sea. Out on the ledge Jean and Herrick watched it dip over the edge of the world.
When the coming night had stolen the last thread of color from the sky they went back to the cove. Herrick piled brush and covered it with great logs of driftwood. At the touch of a match, crackling flames ran out and instantly the savage loneliness of the sea was shut away and the cove became a home.
While they ate the sandwiches they had brought from the ranch-house where they had stopped for dinner, they talked of everything and of nothing. From time to time Herrick went after another log and Jean was left alone, conscious of his absence, of the blackness beyond the fire and the warm security of the rock walls, lit by the firelight. Each time he returned Jean felt that she knew him better.
Stretched on the sand, his head on Jean's spread skirt, Herrick told her of his boyhood and his passionate longing, even as a little child, for the warmth and beauty he had no reason to believe existed.
"We had one of the poorest farms in Connecticut, and if you don't know Connecticut you can't know what that means. There were just a few bleak fields, enclosed by fences of stones that my father had picked from the earth. We grew a little corn and some potatoes, but whenever the crop was good there was no demand, and when prices were high something always killed the crops. We had a few lean cows which I could never believe had been calves. I could never imagine that anything on the place had ever been young. Even my father and my mother. It seemed to me as if they must have always been old and lived in the rickety house, in the bare fields, with the lean cows and the failing crops.