These, of course, were the moments when being alive was enough. Swimming, bread and marmalade, sitting high in a beech tree in the golden eye of the morning sun--that was life. One flew then, like a gay ship with the wind in its sails, over the cold black bottomless waters of misgiving. Many such a June morning Neville remembered in the past.... She wondered if Gerda and if Kay thus sailed over sorrow, too. Rodney, she knew, did. But she knew Rodney better, in some ways, than she knew Gerda and Kay. To think suddenly of Rodney, of Gerda and of Kay, sleeping in the still house beyond the singing wood and silver garden, was to founder swiftly in the cold, dark seas, to be hurt again with the stabbing envy of the night. Not jealousy, for she loved them all too well for that. But envy of their chances, of their contacts with life. Having her own contacts, she wanted all kinds of others too. Not only Rodney's, Gerda's and Kay's, but those of all her family and friends. Conscious, as one is on birthdays, of intense life hurrying swiftly to annihilation, she strove desperately to dam it. It went too fast. She looked at the wet strands of black hair now spread over her shoulders to dry in the sun, at her strong, supple, active limbs, and thought of the days to come, when the black hair should be grey and the supple limbs refuse to carry her up beech trees, and when, if she bathed in the sunrise, she would get rheumatism. In those days, what did one do to keep from sinking in the black seas of regret? One sat by the fire, or in the sunlit garden, old and grey and full of sleep--yes, one went to sleep, when one could. When one couldn't, one read. But one's eyes got tired soon--Neville thought of her grandmother--and one had to be read aloud to, by someone who couldn't read aloud. That wouldn't be enough to stifle vain regrets; only rejoicing actively in the body did that. So, before that time came, one must have slain regret, crushed that serpent's head for good and all.