He swam face deep, catching short breaths under the crook of his arm, burying himself in the live blue running sparkle, every muscle stretched as if he were trying to rub all the staleness that can come to the mind and the restless pricklings that will always worry the body clean from him, like a snake's cast skin, against the wet rough hands of the water. There--it was working--the flesh was compact and separate no longer--he felt it dissolve into the salt push of spray--become one with that long blue body of wave that stretched fluently radiant for miles and miles till it too was no more identity but only sea, receiving the sun, without thought, without limbs, without pain. He sprinted with the last breath he had in him to annihilation in that light lustrous firmament. Then his flung-out hand struck something firm and smooth. With the momentary twinge of a jarred toe, he stopped in the middle of a stroke, grabbed at the firm thing unthinkingly, felt it slip away from him, trod water and came up gasping. “Oh, I'm _horribly_ sorry!” Gurgle and choke at water gone the wrong way. “Honestly--what a dumb-bell trick! but I didn't see you at _all_ and with the whole Sound to swim in I thought I was safe--” He rubbed the water out of his eyes. A woman in a blue cap. Pretty, too--not one of the pretty kind that look like drenched paper-dolls in swimming. “Don't apologize--it's all my fault, really. I should have heard you coming, I suppose, but I was floating and my ears were under water--and this cap! You did scare me a little, though; I didn't know there was anyone else in miles--” She smiled frankly. Ted got another look at her and decided that pretty was hardly right. Beautiful, perhaps, but you couldn't tell with her hair that way under her cap. “You're Mr. Billett, aren't you? Louise said last night that her brother was bringing a friend over Sunday. She also said that she'd introduce us--but we seem to have done that.” “Rather. Introduction by drowning. The latest cleverness in Newport circles--see 'Mode.' And you're Mrs. Severance.” “Yes. Nice water.” “Perfect.” A third look--a fairly long one--left Ted still puzzled. Age--thirty? thirty-five? Swims perfectly. On “Mode.” Wide eyes, sea-blue, sea-changing. An odd nose that succeeded in being beautiful in spite of itself. A rather full small mouth, not loose with sense nor rigid with things controlled, but a mouth that would suck like a bee at the last and tiniest drop of any physical sweet which the chin and the eyes had once decided to want. The eyes measure, the mouth asks, the cleft chin finds the way. A face neither content, nor easily to be contented--in repose it is neither happy nor unhappy but only matured. Louise's friend--that was funny--Louise had such an ideal simplicity of mind. Well-- “If you float--after a while you don't know quite where you're floating,” said Mrs. Severance's voice detachedly.