“Is it love,” she asked of Barry, “that the men feel who want these women?”
Barry laughed shortly. “Love? Good Lord, no.”
“What then, Barry?”
“I don’t know that it can be explained, exactly. … It’s a passing taste, I suppose, a desire for the company of another sex from one’s own, just because it is another sex, though it may have no other attractions. … It’s no use trying to analyse it, one doesn’t get anywhere. But it’s not love.”
“What’s love, then? What’s the difference?”
“Have I to define love, walking down Magpie Alley? You could do it as well as I could. Love has the imagination in it, and the mind. I suppose that’s the difference. And, too, love wants to give. This is all platitude. No one can ever say anything new about love, it’s all been said. Got your latchkey?”
Gerda let herself into the Red House and went up to bed and lay wakeful. Very certainly she loved Barry, with all her imagination and all her mind, and she would have given him more than all that was hers. Very surely and truly she loved him, even if after all he was to be her uncle by marriage, which would make their family life like that in one of Louis Couperus’s books. But why unhappy like that? Was love unhappy? If she might see him sometimes, talk to him, if Nan wouldn’t want all of him all the time—and it would be unlike Nan to do that—she could be happy. One could share, after all. Women must share, for there were a million more women in England than men.
But probably Nan didn’t mean to marry him at all. Nan never married people. …
VIII
Next morning at the office Barry said he had heard from Nan. She had asked him to come too and bicycle in Cornwall, with her and Gerda and Kay.
“You will, won’t you,” said Gerda.
“Rather, of course.”
A vaguely puzzled note sounded in his voice. But he would come.
Cornwall was illuminated to Gerda. The sharing process would begin there. But for a week more she had him to herself, and that was better.
VIII
Nan
I
Nan at Marazion bathed, sailed, climbed, walked and finished her book. She had a room at St. Michael’s Café, at the edge of the little town, just above the beach. Across a space of sea at high tide, and of wet sand and a paved causeway slimy with seaweed at the ebb, St. Michael’s Mount loomed, dark against a sunset sky, pale and unearthly in the dawn, an embattled ship riding anchored on full waters, or stranded on drowned sands.
Nan stayed at the empty little town to be alone. But she was not alone all the time, for at Newlyn, five miles away, there was the artist colony, and some of these artists were her friends. (In point of fact, it is impossible to be alone in Cornwall; the place to go to for that would be Hackney, or some other district of outer London, where inner Londoners do not go for holidays.) Had she liked she could have had friends to play with all day, and talk and laughter and music all night, as in London. She did not like. She went out by herself, worked by herself; and all the time, in company, or alone, talking or working, she knew herself withdrawn really into a secret cove of her own which was warm and golden as no actual coves in this chill summer were warm and golden; a cove on whose good brown sand she lay and made castles and played, while at her feet the great happy sea danced and beat, the great tumbling sea on which she would soon put out her boat.
She would count the days before Barry would be with her.
“Three weeks now. Twenty days; nineteen, eighteen …” desiring neither to hurry nor to retard them, but watching them slip behind her in a deep content. When he came, he and Gerda and Kay, they would spend one night and one day in this fishing-town, lounging about its beach, and in Newlyn, with its steep crooked streets between old grey walls hung with shrubs, and beyond Newlyn, in the tiny fishing hamlets that hung above the little coves from Penzance to Land’s End. They were going to bicycle all along the south coast. But before that they would have had it out, she and Barry; probably here, in the little pale climbing fishing-town. No matter where, and no matter how; Nan cared nothing for scenic arrangements. All she had to do was to convey to Barry that she would say yes now to the question she had put off and off, let him ask it, give her answer, and the thing would be done.
II
Meanwhile she wrote the last chapters of her book, sitting on the beach among drying nets and boats, in some fishing cove up the coast. The Newlyn shore she did not like, because the artist-spoilt children crowded round her, interrupting.
“Lady, lady! Will you paint us?”
“No. I don’t paint.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“Writing. Go away.”
“May we come with you to where you’re staying?”
“No. Go away.”
“Last year
