I couldn't help a light shiver. Certainly this woman might claim that she had lived through an extraordinary cycle of experience. "So he's the same, and the same thing will happen all over again--except for what _I_ do," she added wickedly. "And that will be?" She shook her head and pursed her mouth. "No, no. I won't marry you, George, but I will be your friend. I'm not going to tell you that. You must wait. I see how difficult your position is, and it will be much, much better if you're able to say afterwards that you didn't know anything at all about it." "Isn't it already a little late to say that?" "Well, least said's soonest mended anyway. Got an Officers' Woodbine about you?" "A what?" She laughed. "You must get used to us young things, George. An Officers' Woodbine's a Gasper, otherwise a Gold Flake, otherwise a Yellow Peril, and therefore any sort of a cigarette. _He'll_ know what I mean, and he'll laugh. He went through the war, you see. Oh, I shall be able to make him laugh all right!" So she would reap a profit even out of the war. I could not deny her thoroughness. I gave her a cigarette, and as I held the match for her I saw that she made a note of my care for the brim of her hat. She would pass that too on to Derry as part of his education--that expensive hats must not have holes burned in them. There were fewer bathers on the diving-stage now but the beach was as crowded as ever. Julia noted hats, shoes, costumes; she noted men too, but no young figure in béret and vareuse appeared in the rainbow-coloured coming and going below. Then the hum of an aeroplane was heard, and "Look, that's rather amusing," she remarked as there broke out from the machine, twinkling against the blue, a tiny cirrus-cloudlet of white that slowly dissolved and was borne away--leaflets for the races probably, or advertisements for something or other at the Casino. We ceased to talk. For all I know she was revolving projects that included a new free-wheel bicycle, fresh from its crate, with packing round its saddle and string and paper about its bright parts. Together we watched the fluttering of paper melt away. A minute later you could hardly have imagined that it had ever been there. There seemed no reason why it ever should have been there. There seemed so little reason for any of our activities. Not one of those leaflets had fallen over the land, and had they done so, what then? A litter of paper from an aeroplane, a little of petty acts from a person, and the immensity of the blue persisting exactly as before. For the humming of that plane had reminded me of another humming. I remembered a Tower, with a horse-gin threshing at an adjacent farm. In that Tower too things had happened, so mighty-seeming at the time, so hushed in the empty cells of its stone heart now. I watched the plane out of sight.