“Cool girdles and crests of the sea gods,
“Bright hollows of billowy foam”
—as suitable for the scene.
It was a quiet sea haven they had found. Bliss had tramped there many times, he told her. Around them were wet sea wrack and pungent bog myrtle, tall protruding cliffs with the green grass clinging to them and dusky birds incessantly slipping about. The sea itself was a shadowy, gray wilderness broken with rosy trails which led to darkish mystery. In the sky a star trembled.
“Tell me more,” she demanded childishly.
“What about? I must seem as bad as a complete reading course shipped on without warning,” he began, playing with pebbles, “but do you know what I was thinking, Thurley? That the art vanguard are certain to succeed, that this time of strife should not be for merely freedom of seas and colony disputes—it is the time of discord in which all matters shall have their hearing. And then, one sees absurd glimpses now and then that make one want to shout for joy—”
“What?
“Oh, a life insurance agent with a well worn copy of Keats in his inner pocket or the apparently frivolous hairdresser who reads Ruskin’s essays with the girl who sells fountain pens during lunch hour—or a very famous prima donna who finally admits that the shadow can never be the substance and that works without faith are dead, too!”
Thurley was thinking in disconnected fashion. “Tell me, will the war level class as well, so that it will result in there being no very rich or no poor?”