called to him to come and look in the lovely little rock-pools, dusky
with blossoms of red anemones and brown anemones that seemed nothing but
shadows, and curtained with green of finest sea-silk. Siegmund loved to
poke the white pebbles, and startle the little ghosts of crabs in a
shadowy scuttle through the weed. He would tease the expectant anemones,
causing them to close suddenly over his finger. But Helena liked to
watch without touching things. Meanwhile the sun was slanting behind the
cross far away to the west, and the light was swimming in silver and
gold upon the lacquered water. At last Siegmund looked doubtfully at two
miles more of glistening, gilded boulders. Helena was seated on a stone,
dabbling her feet in a warm pool, delicately feeling the wet sea-velvet
of the weeds.

'Don't you think we had better be mounting the cliffs?' he said.

She glanced up at him, smiling with irresponsible eyes. Then she lapped
the water with her feet, and surveyed her pink toes. She was absurdly,
childishly happy.

'Why should we?' she asked lightly.

He watched her. Her child-like indifference to consequences touched him
with a sense of the distance between them. He himself might play with
the delicious warm surface of life, but always he reeked of the
relentless mass of cold beneath--the mass of life which has no sympathy
with the individual, no cognizance of him.

She loved the trifles and the toys, the mystery and the magic of things.
She would not own life to be relentless. It was either beautiful,
fantastic, or weird, or inscrutable, or else mean and vulgar, below