One great thing about all this Hoover business was the fact that it had freed him from the haunting dread of those terrible sensations of duality and negation. Fighting is the finest antidote to nerve troubles and mental dreads, and he was fighting now for his liberty, for the fact stood clearly before him, that, whether the Rochester family believed him to be Rochester or believed him to be Jones, it was to their interest to hold him as a lunatic in peaceful retirement. Having breakfasted he lit a cigarette, asked Mrs. Henshaw for a latch key so that he might not trouble her, put on his panama and went out. There was a barber's shop across the way, he entered it, found a vacant chair and was shaved. Then he bought a newspaper and strolled in the direction of the beach. The idea had come to him that he might be able to hire a sailing boat and reach London that way, a preposterous and vague idea that still, however, led him till he reached the esplanade, and stood with the sea wind blowing in his face. The only sailing boats visible were excursion craft, guarded by longshoremen, loading up with trippers, and showing placards to allure the innocent. The sands were swarming, and the bathing machines crawling towards the sea. He came on to the beach and took his seat on the warm, white sands, with freedom before him had he been a gull or a fish. To take one of those cockleshell row boats and scull a few miles down the coast would lead him where? Only along the coast, rock-strewn beyond the sands and faced with cliffs. Of boat craft he had no knowledge, the sea was choppy, and the sailing boats now out seemed going like race horses over hurdles. No, he would wait till after luncheon, then in that somnolent hour when all men's thoughts are a bit dulled, and vigilance least awake, he would find some road, on good hard land, and make his dash. He would try and get a bicycle map of this part of Wessex. He had noticed a big stationers' and book-sellers' near the beach, and he would call there on his way back. Then he fell to reading his paper, smoking cigarettes, and watching the crowd. Watching, he was presently rewarded with the sight of the present day disgrace of England. Out of a bathing tent, and into the full sunlight, came a girl with nothing on, for skin tight blue stockinette is nothing in the eyes of Modesty; every elevation, every depression, every crease in her shameless anatomy exposed to a hundred pairs of eyes, she walked calmly towards the water. A young man to match followed. Then they wallowed in the sea. Jones forgot Hoover. He recalled Lady Dolly in "Moths"--Lady Dolly, who, on the beach of Sandbourne-on-Sea would have been the pink of propriety, and the inhabitants of this beach were not wicked society people, but respectable middle class folk. "That's pretty thick," said Jones to an old gentleman like a goat sitting close to him, whose eyes were fixed in contemplation on the bathers. "What?"