Nielsen regarded her proceedings from the beach with an air of comical dismay and admiration.
“Take care, my dear young lady,” he kept on saying, rolling his r’s more than usual. His eyeglass was damp with the interest of his glance, and his umbrella hung uselessly over his shoulder.
“Come along,” said Jocelyn, “I thought you used to be an athlete?”
“It was not the part of the athlete in my day to climb slipperry rocks with young ladies,” he said plaintively, gallantly removing a boot, and standing on one leg in an amiable hesitation.
“Mais en verité,” he muttered to himself, drawing off the other boot and revealing pink socks, in the toe of one of which was a decided hole; “she is not a milk and butter Miss, cette chère Jocelyn,” and he hastily divested himself of the holey sock.
Jocelyn having reached the summit, dropped her skirts, and, shading her face with her hand from the burning sun, looked over the hesitating Nielsen at the lines of the bay, that curved in under the stony, sparsely-covered mountains.
It was one of those cloudless Riviera days, when, seen from behind the sun, the coast loses all other colouring in the vivid tints of the sky and sea. The blue of the distant Esterelles melted in the far west into the paler blue of the heavens, and all the nearer hills and jutting promontories were bathed in a wonderful violet ether. One ultimate snowy peak reared itself aloft, emerging triumphant from the trammels of the light. Looking eastwards, where the sun had already sped his course, every line and patch of colouring was thrown into an intense relief. The white houses stared along the stony, drab slopes. The Campanile with the little black cross upon its summit, sprang up high over the old town of Bordighera, against masses of glistening olives beyond. Along a far spur of the hills an old Italian village stretched in straggling seclusion.
Jocelyn bent over to look into the turquoise pools that lapped with white edges round the green, weed-covered rocks, and now and again caught the shadowy gleam of a fish in the cloudy-blue water. On the next rock to her, two picturesque bare-legged fishers angled lazily with twelve-foot rods of stiff bamboo. The breeze caught her hair, and she turned and looked away over the sea, drawing the soft, salt air through her nostrils with an intense feeling of pleasure.
She was in one of her gipsy moods—it was good to set her back to the land, to those eternal ridges of hills which forced upon her a feeling of imprisonment; very good to turn to the sea, the salt sea, stretching before her in blue, illimitable vastness.
A wonderful glow of life and freedom came upon her with the beating of the soft wind against her face. She felt a wild desire to spread her wings in a long, long flight to a freer life, like the little, lateen-rigged fishing smack, running from the land before the wind—a flight away from convention, and the eternal need for repression; away from all her fears, from the horror which sometimes came over her, from the unconfessed longing which fought against it within her breast; away, into a solitude as great as the sea itself, where no other individualities should besiege her own, giving her a sense of suffocation—a solitude, where there should be no knowledge, and no distrust.