“A few minutes later the back door of one of the bungalows opened, and a figure in a broad-striped bathing suit flung down the paddock, cleared the stile, rushed through the tussock grass into the hollow, staggered up the sandy hillock, and raced for dear life over the big porous stones, over the cold, wet pebbles, on to the hard sand that gleamed like oil. Splish-splosh! Splish-splosh! The water bubbled round his legs as Stanley Burnell waded out exulting. First man in as usual! He'd beaten them all again. And he swooped down to souse his head and neck.”
This is a complete revelation of his character—smug, righteous, selfish, the centre of a world in which every tomorrow shall be like today, and today is without romance. He feels cheated when Jonathan Trout tries to talk to him.
“But curse the fellow! He'd ruined Stanley's bathe. What an unpractical idiot the man was! Stanley struck out to sea again, and then as quickly swam in again, and away he rushed up the beach.”
There is something pathetic in his determination to make a task of everything, even the entailments of matrimony.
“You couldn't help feeling he'd be caught out one day, and then what an almighty cropper he'd come! At that moment an immense wave lifted Jonathan, rode past him, and broke along the beach with a joyful sound. What a beauty! And now there was another. That was the way to live—carelessly, recklessly, spending oneself. He got on to his feet and began to wade towards the shore, pressing his toes into the firm, wrinkled sand. To take things easy, not to fight against the ebb and flow of life, but to give way to it—that was what was needed. It was this tension that was all wrong. To live—to live!”
The whole world of his home moves round Stanley. When he returns for breakfast he has every member of the family working for him. When Beryl does not help him at once, its mechanism must be dislocated. But Linda he can't draw into the net. “Linda's vagueness on these occasions could not be real, Stanley decided.”
The bathing hour on the beach for the women and children is as vivid as if taken by a camera.
“The firm, compact little girls were not half so brave as the tender, delicate-looking little boys. Pip and Rags, shivering, crouching down, slapping the water, never hesitated. But Isabel, who could swim twelve strokes, and Kezia, who could nearly swim eight, only followed on the strict understanding they were not to be splashed. As for Lottie, she didn't follow at all. She liked to be left to go in her own way, please. And that way was to sit down at the edge of the water, her legs straight, her knees pressed together, and to make vague motions with her arms as if she expected to be wafted out to sea. But when a bigger wave than usual, an old whiskery one, came lolloping along in her direction, she scrambled to her feet with a face of horror and flew up the beach again.”
Mrs. Harry Kember and Beryl give an exhibition of the vampire and the novice, while Linda dreams the morning away in revery and retrospect. Beryl's dream of romance when she is alone in the garden after everybody else in the household has gone to bed receives a rude jolt from Harry Kember.
The story is illustrative of Miss Mansfield's art in leaving her characters without killing or marrying them or bringing great adventure into their lives. It leaves one with a keen interest in what is next for Beryl, although she is not the most attractive of the figures in the story, but there is no indication that we shall meet her again. “Granma” and the children are the features of this story, and appear as real as life. The author's faculty in making the reader interested in characters who do not play heroic or leading rôles is distinctive. Even the sheep-dog's encounter with the cat on the gatepost is delightful, also the glimpse of Mrs. Stubbs' cottage with its array of bathing suits and shoes and the lady's reception of Alice are art: “With her broad smile and the long bacon knife in her hand, she looked like a friendly brigand.”