The box he had ordered from Paris had arrived. First there was a mass of Juliette roses--gilt and velvet--then a staircase of sweet peas, flame-coloured, coral, crimson, magenta, purple, bronze and black. Both together they drank in the blaze of colour. Ecstatically he said to her, "You can't thank _me_, can you? They are too beautiful." "Perhaps not," she said, "but it was beauty unleashed by you." He looked at her with adoring eyes. She gave you phrases which lit torches in your soul. They walked down the beach together. The sea was light and mutinous. "How untransparent it is," he said, "lapis lazuli and turquoise and chrysoprase--no emeralds or aquamarines, or sapphires." "How are we to get in our purple without an amethyst?" "I don't know." "That is what comes from not reading the Book of Revelations," she said. They saw big, dissolving, poisonous jellyfish in the sea, mysteriously without lines--and tidy slabs of jellyfish on the beach. They found a starfish, and wondered who came to dance a sword dance round it. They picked up shells that looked as if they had fallen out of fading sunsets or glimmering dawns--they looked into pools of shutting and opening sea anemones. They never noticed a sardine box or an old boot. They were happy. Over her head was a scarlet paper sunshade. It looked like a huge tropical flower. "Paula," he said--and his eyes opened to her like a magic trap door. That night they stayed indoors. "Tell me the things that life has given you," he said, "the things that have made you so rich." "If I am rich," she said, "it is from the things that _I_ have given." "Yes," he said, "but why do you impoverish yourself at my expense?" "Please," she said, "don't talk about that. There are in all of us exposed places--you can call them pain or romance--Sehnsucht or memory--but they are the sanctuaries of our hearts--they cannot be violated." "Paula," he said, "you have made too much of life. You have made it into the sort of hope that is always a disillusionment." "Yes," she murmured very low. "Why were you so unpractical?" his bantering tone revived her.