“Cooooooo—ooo—er—Bill.” The sudden familiar sound came just above her head. Where was she? What a pity. The boys had wakened her. Then she had been asleep! It was perfect. The footsteps belonging to the voice had passed along just above her head; nice boys, they could not help chi-iking when they saw the sleeping figures, but they did not mean to disturb. They had wakened her from her first daytime sleep. Asleep! She had slept in broad sunlight at the foot of the little cliff. Waking in the day time is perfect happiness. To wake suddenly and fully, nowhere; in paradise; and then to see sharply with large clear strong eyes the things you were looking at when you fell asleep. She lay perfectly still. Perhaps the girls were asleep. Presently they would all be sitting up again and she would have to begin once more the tiring effort to be as clever as they were. But it would be a little different now that they had all lain stretched out at the foot of the cliffs asleep. She was changed. Something had happened since she had fallen asleep disappointed in the east-coast sea and the little low cliff, wondering why she could not see and feel them like the seas and cliffs of her childhood. She could see and feel them now, as long as no one spoke and the first part of the morning remained far away. She closed her eyes and drifted drowsily back to the moment of being awakened by the sudden cry. In the instant before her mind had slid back and she had listened to the muffled footsteps thudding along the turf of the low cliff above her head, waiting angrily and anxiously for further disturbance, she had been perfectly alive, seeing; perfect things all round her, no beginning or ending … there had been moments like that, years ago, in gardens, by seas and cliffs. Her mind wandered back amongst these; calling up each one with perfect freshness. They were all the same. In each one she had felt exactly the same; outside life, untouched by anything, free. She had thought they belonged to the past, to childhood and youth. In childhood she had thought each time that the world had just begun and would always be like that; later on, she now remembered, she had always thought when such a moment came that it would be the last and clung to it with wide desperate staring eyes until tears came and she had turned away from some great open scene with a strong conscious body flooded suddenly by a strong warm tide to the sad dark world to live for the rest of her time upon a memory. But the moment she had just lived was the same, it was exactly the same as the first one she could remember, the moment of standing, alone, in bright sunlight on a narrow gravel path in the garden at Babington between two banks of flowers, the flowers level with her face and large bees swinging slowly to and fro before her face from bank to bank, many sweet smells coming from the flowers and amongst them a strange pleasant smell like burnt paper. … It was the same moment. She saw it now in just the same way; not remembering going into the garden or any end to being in the bright sun between the blazing flowers, the two banks linked by the slowly swinging bees, nothing else in the world, no house behind the little path, no garden beyond it. Yet she must somehow have got out of the house and through the shrubbery
