Christian Trevalga was born in a little sea-coast village in Cornwall, and the earliest thing he remembered was the sharp, creaking voice of the sea-gulls, as they swept past him at the edge of the cliff, high up over the sea. He was conscious of it, because it hurt him, sooner than he was conscious of the many voices of the sea, which, all through his childhood, sang out of the midst of all his dreams. Pain always meant more to him than pleasure, though, indeed, he was not always sure if the things that hurt him were not the things he cared for most. He was thirty-six now, and he had never gone back to the village since he left it, at the age of sixteen, to come to London and try to win a scholarship at the College. His father was a gentleman, who had come down in the world; drink, gambling, and a low kind of debauchery brought him down; and when he came back from Spain in a certain year, sobered, something of a wreck, and married to a slow-witted Spanish woman whom he had found no one knew where, he had only an old-fashioned, untidy, but large and rambling, house on a cliff to live in, on the outskirts of a village, most of which had once belonged to him. Debts and mortgages left just enough to live on uncomfortably; he was not exacting now, and the place was good for an idle, helpless man, who was tired of what he called living, and had taken a late fancy to the open air, and, as soon as the child was old enough, to the companionship of his child. His wife sat indoors all day, crouching over the fire, except when the summer heat was extreme, and then she lay on the grass, under an umbrella. When they sat at table her fingers were always crumbling the bread into tiny crumbs, and often, at tea-time especially, she would take a large slice of bread and mould it into little figures, little nude figures exquisitely proportioned, with all the modelling of the limbs and shoulder-blades. Sometimes she would do more than a single figure, a little well, for instance, and a woman kneeling at the brink, and leaning over it, with her arms outstretched. She loved the little figures, and talked about them very seriously, criticising their defects, not content with the lines that she had got, seeing them with subtler curves than any she had been able to get. She would like to have kept some of them, but, though she soaked them in milk, they would always crumble away as soon as the bread dried. Christian stared at her when her fingers were busy; he was puzzled, not exactly happy; he generally ran away and left her for his father, who was not so queer, half-absorbed, and busy about nothing.