"The sea," she repeated in a low voice.
"Yes, that's what you want to set you up—rather! Do you remember that fortnight at Littlehampton, you and me and your Aunt? Jolly that was! I like Littlehampton. It isn't flash like Brighton, and Margate's always so beastly crowded. And do you remember that afternoon by the windmill? I did love you that afternoon, Bessie!"…
He continued to talk, but she was not listening. She was wondering why the words "the sea" were somehow part of it all—the pins and brooches of the Museum, the book on her knees, the dream. She remembered a game of hide-and-seek she had played as a child, in which cries of "Warm, warm, warmer!" had announced the approach to the hidden object. Oh, she was getting warm—positively hot….
He had ceased to talk, and was watching her. Perhaps it was the thought of how he had loved her that afternoon by the windmill that had brought him close to her chair again. She was aware of his nearness, and closed her eyes for a moment as if she dreaded something. Then she said quickly, "Is tea nearly ready, Ed?" and, as he turned to the table, took up the book again.
She felt that even to touch that book brought her "warmer." It fell open at a page. She did not hear the clatter Ed made at the table, nor yet the babble his words had evoked, of the pierrots and banjos and minstrels of Margate and Littlehampton. It was to hear a gladder, wilder tumult that she sat once more so still, so achingly listening….
"The earnest trumpet spake, and silver thrills From kissing cymbals made a merry din—"
The words seemed to move on the page. In her eyes another light than the firelight seemed to play. Her breast rose, and in her thick white throat a little inarticulate sound twanged.
"Eh? Did you speak, Bessie?" Ed asked, stopping in his buttering of bread.
"Eh?… No."
In answering, her head had turned for a moment, and she had seen him. Suddenly it struck her with force: what a shaving of a man he was! Desk-chested, weak-necked, conscious of his little "important" lip and chin—yes, he needed a Polytechnic gymnastic course! Then she remarked how once, at Margate, she had seen him in the distance, as in a hired baggy bathing-dress he had bathed from a machine, in muddy water, one of a hundred others, all rather cold, flinging a polo-ball about and shouting stridently. "A sound mind in a sound body!"… He was rather vain of his neat shoes, too, and doubtless stunted his feet; and she had seen the little spot on his neck caused by the chafing of his collar-stud…. No, she did not want him to touch her, just now at any rate. His touch would be too like a betrayal of another touch … somewhere, sometime, somehow … in that tantalising dream that refused to allow itself either to be fully remembered or quite forgotten. What was that dream? What was it?…