Nielsen’s gently imperturbable voice recalled her.
“I am coming, my dear young lady; just a little patience, it is very slipperry, don’t you see.” He was picking a gingerly way with his bare feet from one stone to another.
“Go back,” she cried almost harshly. “I’m coming off!”
What was the use of her wild thoughts! She was bound! bound to that undefined struggle which, whether she would or no, was always going on within her. Her face clouded with its wonted look of defeat, and she sighed. She waited till Nielsen was returning, and then waded back herself.
The feelings which the sea had roused in her made her irritable.
“It’s a dull sea—the Mediterranean,” she said from one side of a rock, putting on her shoes and stockings, “no tides, no ebb and flow; what a monotony! I wonder it finds it worth while to break on its shores at all!”
“You would not say that if you saw it in a storm,” came, in plaintive, half-choked parenthesis, from the other side of the rock, where the discreet Swede was also resuming his boots.
“It manages to break on every shore all round; I should like to know where it parts its hair,” continued Jocelyn meditatively.
“My dear young lady, it is like the bald-headed man, don’t you know; it does not part its hair at all, it has no hair to part in the middle, don’t you see, only a fringe that falls on all sides.”
Nielsen appeared suddenly from round the rock, his hat in his hand, smoothing his own well-covered, flaxen head appreciatively.