“and the cloud shadows on those hills opposite, and Mrs. Roberts, with her sackcloth cooking-apron and her clogs and the boy’s cap she wears; and Blodwen, even if all the English they know does always seem to be all about you! And I should hate a pier-concert if there was one. There’s everything here to make me quite happy. Since this very hot weather’s come, the bathing is delicious. I learned to swim when I was a little girl, thank you.”
(So he needn’t think he can teach me anything.)
“How was Mr. Albert Waters? Still chuckling and laughing ‘ho, ho!’ I expect.
“I laughed at your being taken in like that by Miss Robinson. Yesterday morning I was almost taken in, by something that was like you: a sharp tap against my bedroom window that might have been a stone thrown up. But it was only a fat, speckly thrush cracking a snail; there are always lots of them crawling out of that southernwood bush by the door.
“Mrs. Roberts asks me to tell you,”
(What she said, in her speciously honeyed Welsh voice and with her irresistible if toothless smile, was, “Tell your Cariad——” But I needn’t put that.)
“that the ’ooden ’ooman—it took me some time to remember that this was the figure-head on the cliff!—was want paint very bad, and she wonder would you do it when you come. Welsh people, I notice, are fond of ‘wondering’ like this, instead of asking straight out for what they want; yet they generally seem to get it.”
(Dear me, this is rather different from the blank sheet I might have enclosed.... Anyhow, it mustn’t get any longer than his, so I’d better stop now.)
“I will give this to Theo to post, and”