At the juncture when Mrs. Cartwright enters this story she was able to make any holiday pay for itself twice over; witness her "Wanderings in Western France." It was about this time, too, that she had begun to afford not only the warmest underwear for Keith and Reggie, but the silkiest for herself.
Even yet, she discovered, silk "things" were a joy to her again. So were her perfectly simple suède shoes. All these years she had lived and toiled for Reggie and Keith; she was only just beginning to find herself in this toiler. She was beginning to discover other relics, beside the Eastern embroideries and the scent, of the woman whom she had thought to be left dead beside her merry soldier husband.
Surprising.... Life was still surprising; interesting. Let people take it out of her "fullertons" if it amused them....
She completed the "sugary" paragraph that brought her instalment to the requided "curtain," wrote "To be continued" beneath it, and smoothed the blotting-paper down over the pad with a sigh of relief.
"There!"
She rose, stretching the tall symmetry of herself under the Persian robe, then glanced with raised eye-brows at her watch.
So late? She had not realized the flight of the midnight hours. Everybody else in the hotel would be asleep.
Mrs. Cartwright snapped off the lights. Guided by a thin streak of moonlight on the floor, she stepped to the window, flung first the shutters then the windows open, and stepped out, all shimmering and ghostly, on to her balcony. She stood—accustomed to air about her—looking out on the moon-bathed scene below. The Baissin was a sheet of silver; the belt of sandhills silver-grey. No words can give the whiteness of the Biscay rollers, silent with distance, tossing their columns of foam to the vast and lambent sky. Stars were as pin-points. Reassuringly near, the lighthouse raised its taper finger, on which the light sparkled like a jewel, now white, now red.
Mrs. Cartwright, enjoying all this too much to feel cold, stood watching.
Why did people sleep away the best part of the twenty-four hours? Why scuttle away and hide from Beauty within the ugliness of their own houses? It was only once in months that a woman stood as she was standing at that virgin hour, able to lose herself in the solitude, the freshness and silence and light. She stood, dematerialized, part no longer of a woman's warm and pulsing body, but of the sea and sky themselves.... White, red.... White, red ... the phare light flashed almost in time to the soft breathing, that could be heard, in that perfect stillness of her body. She was outside it.... Ah! What was that?