So they'd gone off to Cap Ferret. Midday had found this tall girl and boy upon Biscay shore where four days before Mrs. Cartwright's dove-lunch party had walked, watching those rollers. Soaring to crash, gathering and soaring once again to crash, those great waves boomed the chorus that had sounded across wide sea and wide shore long "before the months had names." It would go on sounding long after the names of those two on the seashore had ceased to be music to those who loved them.
But this was the moment when the waves sang for them, only for them.
Golden van Huysen had said something about surf-riding. The young aviator, his eyes turning for a moment from her to the tumultuous waters, had muttered, "Dangerous game for a girl!"
She laughed. "What a lot of things there are that you English think a girl can't do! It would do you lots of good to get to know some American girls. Then you'd see!"
He made no reply. His eyes were again upon her.
She wore what he had come to know were (out of uniform) her only colours; white and gold. Her dress of some creamy white stuff, perfectly cut, and over it she had slipped a knitted coat of yellowy silk. Crisp as a gardenia-petal, her skirt blew out above her ankles, and her feet, not small, but shapely as those of a sandalled Hermes. No hat hid her hair, which glinted like a casque in the sun as they turned away from the sea towards the dunes.
Here Jack Awdas took the plunge.
"See some American girls, you say? You're all the girl I want to see," he declared, not knowing that he spoke with the boyish vehemence that had so lately taken Claudia Cartwright's breath. The persistence with which he'd wooed that first love he now turned upon this—this only love of his.
"You're all the girls in the world to me," said he. "D'you understand?"
She did, and she did not. She stared at him: her uncovered gold head almost on a level with his own fair head, crested by that flyer's cap.