Yet they did not even know they were alone. Merely they existed, they were. They were part of the ocean, which does not think but only fulfils its laws. Tides curve and bubble in, earth receives them, earth lets them ebb. Soft shells pulverize, hard shells polish, sand hills slither, seaweeds dry and blacken: the bay takes the sea in its great arms and is content: and inland the farmyard dogs, those spotted moralists, are scandalized by the moon. The moon--chaste herself, bright persuasion of unchastity in others. For life is all one piece, of endless pattern. No stitch in the vast fabric can be unravelled without risking the whole tapestry. It is the garment woven without seams. Here was beauty; and they, not knowing it, were part of it unawares. Here was no thinking, merely the great rhythm of ordered accident, gulls’ wings white against thunder, the electric circuits of law broken by the clear crystal of fancy. And the sea, the silly sea, meaningless, prolific, greatest of lovers, brawling over the cold pumice reefs of dead volcanoes, groping tenderly up slants of thirsty sand. The sea that breeds life and the land that breeds thought, destined lovers and enemies, made to meet and destroy, to mingle and deny, marking earth with strangeness wherever they embrace. The sea, the bitter sea, that makes man suspect he is homeless and has no roof but dreams. Janet, who was big enough to go beyond the low surf and grapple the White Whale in his own element, liked Mr. Martin because he did not talk much and understood the game at once. When she harpooned him he rolled and thrashed in foam, churning with his flukes as a wounded whale should; and came floating in so they could haul him to land and cut him up for blubber. This, she explained, is the flensing stage, marking out a flat area of moist sand. Then they burned the blubber in a great bonfire, a beacon that glared tawnily in the night, to guide the relief ship to their perilous coast. Martin found it ticklish to be flensed, so they lay and made tunnels. The tide was going, the flat belt of wet beach was like a mirror, reflecting the rich sword-blade colour of the West. But Martin was a little puzzled. “What did you say your names are?” he asked again. “Janet and Sylvia and Rose,” they said, delighted at his stupidity. For it is always thrilling to tell people your name: it proves that you too belong to this important world. Still, this didn’t account for the other, the fourth one. He had seen her watching them from the beach, and then she had been playing with them in the tumbling water. He had thought the children just a little bit rude not to greet her when she joined them. She was not as brown as they, so perhaps she was a stranger who had newly arrived. But now, when that heavy thunder rolled like wagon wheels across a dark bridge of clouds, and the other three ran off to the bath house to dress, she was sitting there beside him.