And this, which is the last that I shall inflict upon you, dear yawners, nobody at all told me. I made it up, unaided, and by my little self." She looked away above her coffee-cup as she quoted it, and her eyes were the eyes of all the girls that be, appealing to all the plighted lovers:
"'Remember that nine out of ten women in the world will never know what Love can be, and that six out of those nine are married women. Please won't you try to make me the happy Tenth?'
And now, when all the people have said Amen, what about a walk down to Biscay?——No, Miss Walsh! Please. This is my day. I proposed this, and I know you won't grudge me this little pleasure."
She paid the addition and drew on her loose white gloves.
Through the woods they went, and over the sandhills planted with grass in lines to keep that barrier together.
Olwen, in her red woolly coat, walked between Mrs. Cartwright, whose short blue skirts flapped like a wind-blown succory flower above her ankles, and Miss Walsh, who was holding on to her hat. Little Olwen thought irrelevantly—"and, fancy! we're all three wearing that Charm!"
They descended from the dunes, passed the loose shuffling upper sands, and came on to the stretch of other sands, smooth, hard, and firm as a ballroom floor set down in the widest landscape that any of them had trodden yet. Soaring skies, illimitable beach, and oh, how empty seemed the sea far, far behind the breakers of Biscay Bay!
At the sight of those breakers, whose sound had been growing in her ears, Olwen gave an involuntary "Oh! Look at them!"
From the hotel windows they seemed nothing more than a crawling white line. Here they were rushing monsters that seemed to shake the shore where they broke. They broke and spouted not more than fifty yards away, then swirled and seethed almost to the feet of the women in surf, in the lines that would be taken by boiling milk.
Olwen stood nearest with spray on her cheeks, thunder in her ears, and a storm of unimagined whiteness before her eyes, finding it all riotously beautiful. But the last thing in the world that she expected was what Mrs. Cartwright then said: