“God, what a stumor!” was Doug’s final verdict on Stanley, as the train from Gullick bore him away, with his womenfolk. “Well, I’m going to take old Rough for another swim; it freshens him up.” Doug poised for an instant in clean outline against the dark waves, and then plunged, followed in untidy, spluttering fashion by his dog, who detested the water, and only went in uttering sharp yelps of anguish because he believed each time that Doug was in the extremities of a life-and-death struggle. Ursula watched the pair till they disappeared round the headland which jutted from the opposite side of the cove. Doug was swimming magnificently; he was certainly in superb physical condition.... And so ready for a romantic episode, that he was only kept from it by the sheer fact of no accessible girl--“And that’s a fact which can’t go on for ever,” mused Ursula. So she had achieved nothing more than false security, by their withdrawal to loneliness and the country. He was bursting to talk of Doug-land and the horizon that pulled and pulled, to some one--not herself, oh, not herself!--to some one fresh and tremulous, who would say “we mustn’t, Doug....” and long for such a ringing love-adventure with so superb a hero. It must come some time, sooner or later; Ursula knew she could not always strain to hold at arms-length the inevitable meeting. She had mistaken delay for prevention. But she had not altered Doug. The very next girl. “Ahoy--y--y!” Doug was exultantly calling her attention to himself from the opposite headland of rock. Sure of his audience, he treated her to a careless ripple of his muscles, then stood taut and dived. His black head reappeared on the surface several yards nearer to her. “Oh--he does want his nice brand-new romance!” And with that, her sense of property flared up to a fierce height. You ought never to have to give up what has once been yours. Not a room nor a husband; and not the illusion that whatever sudden change you make in your life, is the right change. The very next girl. [II] URSULA began to think quite a lot about her intangible rival. Then to be irritated by her. If she could have fixed her mind on a certain definite personality--been jealous of it, she might have wrestled better with jealousy than now, when compelled to alter over and over again the shape and colour of a girl, the way she moved, and the intonations of her voice, to alter all these and twist them a thousand times, and then destroy the revision and throw the whole girl away and pick up a totally different one. All that Ursula knew for certain was that the girl would come. And that this anticipation of her, the wondering and the waiting, was a thousand times more torturing than the actual spectacle of Doug in the throes of an episode. This one, which perforce was bound to overtake him, had gained importance by the elaborate way in which she had drawn him to step backward and backward from it.