“Oh, you’re brutal. I hate you. You’ve said the cruelest, meanest things that have ever been said to me.”
“But they’re so.”
“I don’t care. Why shouldn’t I be hard? Why shouldn’t I love to live and be loved? Look at my life. See what I’ve had.”
“You like me, in a way.”
“I admire your intellect.”
“Quite so; and others receive the gifts of your personality.”
“I can’t help it. I can’t be mean to the man I’m with. He’s good to me. I won’t. I’d be sinning against the only conscience I have.”
They were blowing a bugle for lunch when we came back, and down we went. G. was already at table. The orchestra was playing “Auld Lang Syne,” “Home, Sweet Home,” “Dixie,” and the “Suwanee River.” It even played one of those delicious American rags which I love so much—the “Oceana Roll.” I felt a little lump in my throat at “Auld Lang Syne” and “Dixie,” and together Miss X. and I hummed the “Oceana Roll” as it was played. One of the girl passengers came about with a plate to obtain money for the members of the orchestra, and half-crowns were generally deposited. Then I started to eat my dessert; but G., who had hurried off, came back to interfere.
“Come, come,”—he is always most emphatic—“you’re missing it all. We’re landing.”
I thought we were leaving at once. The eye behind the monocle was premonitory of some great loss to me. I hurried on deck, to thank his artistic and managerial instinct instantly I arrived there. Before me was Fishguard and the Welsh coast, and to my dying day I shall never forget it. Imagine, if you please, a land-locked harbor, as green as grass in this semi-cloudy, semi-gold-bathed afternoon, with a half-moon of granite scarp rising sheer and clear from the green waters to the low gray clouds overhead. On its top I could see fields laid out in pretty squares or oblongs, and at the bottom of what to me appeared to be the east end of the semicircle was a bit of gray scruff, which was the village, no doubt. On the green water were several other boats—steamers, much smaller, with red stacks, black sides, white rails and funnels, bearing a family resemblance to the one we were on. There was a long pier extending out into the water from what I took to be the village, and something farther inland that looked like a low shed.