“Yes, there’s nothing better in all the world than a sail. It is all the world while it lasts. A boat’s like your own fireside for snugness.” A dreamier light came into her eye, which wandered, with a turn of the head giving him the tender curve of her cheek, over the levels of the bay, roughened everywhere by the breeze, but yellowish green in the channels and dark with the thick growth of eel-grass in the shallows; then she lifted her face to the pale blue heavens in an effort that slanted towards him the soft round of her chin, and showed her full throat. “This is the kind of afternoon,” she said, still looking at the sky, “that you think will never end.” “I wish it wouldn’t,” he answered. She lowered her eyes to his, and asked: “Do you have times when you are sorry that you ever tried to do anything—when it seems foolish to have tried?” “I have the other kind of times,—when I wish that I had tried to do something.” “Oh yes, I have those, too. It’s wholesome to be ashamed of not having tried to do anything; but to be ashamed of having tried—it’s like death. There seems no recovery from that.” He did not take advantage of her confession, or try to tempt her to further confidence; and women like men who have this wisdom, or this instinctive generosity, and trust them further. “And the worst of it is that you can’t go back and be like those that have never tried at all. If you could, that would be some consolation for having failed. There is nothing left of you but your mistake.” “Well,” he said, “some people are not even mistakes. I suppose that almost any sort of success looks a good deal like failure from the inside. It must be a poor creature that comes up to his own mark. The best way is not to have any mark, and then you’re in no danger of not coming up to it.” He laughed, but she smiled sadly. “You don’t believe in thinking about yourself,” she said. “Oh, I try a little introspection, now and then. But I soon get through: there isn’t much of me to think about.” “No, don’t talk in that way,” she pleaded, and she was very charming in her earnestness: it was there that her charm lay. “I want you to be serious with me, and tell me—tell me how men feel when.”— A sudden splashing startled her, and looking round she saw a multitude of curious, great-eyed, black heads, something like the heads of boys, and something like the heads of dogs, thrusting from the water, and flashing under it again at sight of them with a swish that sent the spray into the air. She sprang to her feet. “Oh, look at those things! Look at them! Look at them!” She laid vehement hands upon the young man, and pushed him in the direction in which she wished him to look, at some risk of pushing him overboard, while he laughed at her ecstasy. “They’re seals. The bay’s full of them. Did you never see them on the reef at Jocelyn’s?”