comes to Jocelyn's remains. The beach at the foot of the bluff is almost
a mile at its curve, and it is so smooth and hard that it glistens like
polished marble when newly washed by the tide. It is true that you reach
it from the top by a flight of eighty steps, but it was intended to have
an elevator, like those near the Whirlpool at Niagara. In the mean time
it is easy enough to go down, and the ladies go down every day, taking
their novels or their needle-work with them. They have various notions of
a bath: some conceive that it is bathing to sit in the edge of the water,
and emit shrieks as the surge sweeps against them; others run boldly in,
and after a moment of poignant hesitation jump up and down half-a-dozen
times, and run out; yet others imagine it better to remain immersed to
the chin for a given space, looking toward the shore with lips tightly
shut and the breath held. But after the bath they are all of one mind;
they lay their shawls on the warm sand, and, spreading out their hair to
dry, they doze in the sun, in such coils and masses as the unconscious
figure lends itself to. When they rise from their beds, they sit in the
shelter of the cliff and knit or sew, while one of them reads aloud, and
another stands watch to announce the coming of the seals, which frequent
a reef near the shore in great numbers. It has been said at rival points
on the coast that the ladies linger there in despair of ever being able
to remount to the hotel. A young man who clambered along the shore from
one of those points reported finding day after day the same young lady
stretched out on the same shawl, drying the same yellow hair, who had
apparently never gone upstairs since the season began. But the recurrence
of this phenomenon in this spot at the very moment when the young man
came by might have been accounted for upon other theories. Jocelyn's was
so secluded that she could not have expected any one to find her there
twice, and if she had expected this she would not have permitted it.
Probably he saw a different young lady each time.