"Come out, dear!" called Grandmama from the esplanade. "You'll be ill!"
Back they came, Neville first. Neville, seeing from afar her mother's blue face, called "Mother dear, how cold you are! You shouldn't have stayed in so long!"
"I was waiting," Mrs. Hilary said, "for you."
"Oh why, dear?"
"Don't know. I thought I would.... It's pretty poor fun," Mrs. Hilary added, having failed after trying not to, "bathing all alone on one's birthday."
Neville gave a little sigh, and gently propelled her mother to the shore. She hadn't felt like this on her birthday, when Kay and Gerda had gone off to some avocation of their own and left her in the garden. Many things she had felt on her birthday, but not this. It is an undoubted truth that people react quite differently to birthdays.
Rosalind rose out of the foam like Aphrodite, grandly beautiful, though all the paint was washed off her face and lips.
"Wonderful people," she apostrophised the shore-coming family. "Anyone would think you were all nineteen. I was the only comfy one."
Rosalind was always talking about age, emphasizing it, as if it were very important.
They hurried up to the tents, and last of all came Nan, riding in to shore on a swelling wave and lying full length where it flung her, for the joy of feeling the wet sand sucking away beneath her.