"Cooooooo--ooo--er--Bill." The sudden familiar sound came just above her
head. Where was she? _What_ a pity. The boys had wakened her. Then she
had been asleep! It was perfect. The footsteps belonging to the voice
had passed along just above her head; nice boys, they could not help
chi-iking when they saw the sleeping figures, but they did not mean to
disturb. They had wakened her from her first day-time sleep. Asleep! She
had slept in broad sunlight at the foot of the little cliff. Waking in
the day time is _perfect_ happiness. To wake suddenly and fully,
nowhere; in paradise; and then to see sharply with large clear strong
eyes the things you were looking at when you fell asleep. She lay
perfectly still. Perhaps the girls were asleep. Presently they would all
be sitting up again and she would have to begin once more the tiring
effort to be as clever as they were. But it would be a little different
now that they had all lain stretched out at the foot of the cliffs
asleep. She was changed. Something had happened since she had fallen
asleep disappointed in the east-coast sea and the little low cliff,
wondering why she could not see and feel them like the seas and cliffs
of her childhood. She could see and feel them now, as long as no one
spoke and the first part of the morning remained far away. She closed
her eyes and drifted drowsily back to the moment of being awakened by
the sudden cry. In the instant before her mind had slid back and she had
listened to the muffled footsteps thudding along the turf of the low
cliff above her head, waiting angrily and anxiously for further
disturbance, she had been perfectly alive, seeing; perfect things all
round her, no beginning or ending ... there had been moments like that,
years ago, in gardens, by seas and cliffs. Her mind wandered back
amongst these; calling up each one with perfect freshness. They were all
the same. In each one she had felt exactly the same; outside life,
untouched by anything, free. She had thought they belonged to the past,
to childhood and youth. In childhood she had thought each time that the
world had just begun and would always be like that; later on, she now
remembered, she had always thought when such a moment came that it would
be the last and clung to it with wide desperate staring eyes until tears
came and she had turned away from some great open scene with a strong
conscious body flooded suddenly by a strong warm tide to the sad dark
world to live for the rest of her time upon a memory. But the moment she
had just lived was the same, it was exactly the _same_ as the first one
she could remember, the moment of standing, alone, in bright sunlight on
a narrow gravel path in the garden at Babington between two banks of
flowers, the flowers level with her face and large bees swinging slowly
to and fro before her face from bank to bank, many sweet smells coming
from the flowers and amongst them a strange pleasant smell like burnt
paper.... It was the same moment.