I never wished before to be a bird or a fish; mere feet seemed a most inadequate means of getting me to Virginia. But I set off, very nearly at a run. The wrong turns that I took, the hills that I went up, the hills that I went down, the people that I asked, the wrong directions they gave me,—they seemed quite innumerable. Daddy Hole Plain was about as difficult to get to as heaven, and when I got there the angel would be flown!
But she wasn't.... For when at last I saw before me the bit of green downs with the seats facing the bay, the white figure was there. Virginia was sitting looking out to sea where the sun was setting, making a red path on the water, and the white-sailed yawl was drifting to the west!... I was so hot and tired, so travel-stained and dusty! Virginia looked so cool and sweet!... To see her there after all my wandering and disappointment was too much.... I could not speak. She heard my step, looked up and saw me coming—looked glad, I think.... Her little feet were crossed in front of her upon the turf, and I just flung myself beside them, and something—so like a lump of ice, that I had always carried in my breast until I saw Virginia—melted entirely at that moment, and began to beat.
VIRGINIA POMEROY
Torquay, South Devon
Bella Vista Hotel
June 19—
If he had come the next day, or even the same week, he would have had a cold welcome, for on the whole I did not understand, nor did I fancy, his methods.
But I had had time to think, time to talk it over with mamma, time to write Breck Calhoun that there was no use in our discussing the old subject, for I feared, though I was not absolutely sure, that there was 'some one else.' Always dear old Breck has finished by saying, 'Jinny, there is no one else?' And there never was till now.
Now there is not only some one else, but there is also in very truth 'no one else' who counts! All is absolutely different from, and yet precisely like, everything that I have imagined ever since the foundation of the earth. In love, he is, what all good men and good women ought to be, something quite unlike his former self, or the outer self he shows to the world. He has lost himself and found himself again in me, and I have gone through the same mysterious operation. He has place for no troublesome uncertainty of mind now, although mamma and I have decreed a year of waiting, in which we shall have ample time to change if we choose. But we shall not choose; we were made for each other, as we have both known ever since the day we had luncheon together at the Mug o' Cider in Little Widger.
What chapters, what books, we talked sitting in the gorse bushes on Daddy Hole Plain! In the evening of my days I shall doubtless be glad that I climbed those heights, remembering that Archibald had to exert himself somewhat arduously in order to ask me to marry him. I wanted to be alone and feast my eyes on the dazzling blue of the sea, one broad expanse of sapphire, stretching off, off, into eternity; a blue all be-diamonded with sunlit sparkles; a blue touched with foam-flecks wherever it broke on the rocks or the islets. Granted that any view has charms when one is young and in love, the view from Daddy Hole Plain would inspire an octogenarian, or even a misogynist.
'It was in Exeter we really met, you remember,' I reminded Archibald.