Next morning they took the road eastward.  They were going to ride along the coast to Talland Bay, where they were going to spend a week.  They were giving themselves a week to get there, which would allow plenty of time for bathing by the way.  It is no use hurrying in Cornwall, the hills are too steep and the sea too attractive, and lunch and tea, when ordered in shops, so long in coming.  The first day they only got round the Lizard to Cadgwith, where they dived from steep rocks into deep blue water.  Nan dived from a high rock with a swoop like a sea bird’s, a pretty thing to watch.  Barry was nearly as good; he too was physically proficient.  The Bendishes were less competent; they were so much younger, as Barry said.  But they too reached the water head first, which is, after all, the main thing in diving.  And as often as Nan dived, with her arrowy swoop, Gerda tumbled in too, from the same rock, and when Nan climbed a yet higher rock and dived again, Gerda climbed too, and fell in sprawling after her.  Gerda to-day was not to be outdone, anyhow in will to attempt, whatever her achievement might lack.  Nan looked up from the sea with a kind of mocking admiration at the little figure poised on the high shelf of rock, slightly unsteady about the knees, slightly blue about the lips, thin white arms pointing forward for the plunge.

The child had pluck....  It must have hurt, too, that slap on the nearly flat body as she struck the sea.  She hadn’t done it well.  She came up with a dazed look, shaking the water out of her eyes, coughing.

“You’re too ambitious,” Barry told her.  “That was much too high for you.  You’re also blue with cold.  Come out.”

Gerda looked up at Nan, who was scrambling nimbly onto the highest ledge of all, crying “I must have one more.”

Barry said to Gerda “No, you’re not going after her.  You’re coming out.  It’s no use thinking you can do all Nan does.  None of us can.”

Gerda gave up.  The pace was too hard for her.  She couldn’t face that highest rock; the one below had made her feel cold and queer and shaky as she stood on it.  Besides, why was she trying, for the first time in her life, to go Nan’s pace, which had always been, and was now more than ever before, too hot and mettlesome for her?  She didn’t know why; only that Nan had been, somehow, all day setting the pace, daring her, as it were, to make it.  It was becoming, oddly, a point of honour between them, and neither knew how or why.

3

On the road it was the same.  Nan, with only the faintest, if any application of brakes, would commit herself to lanes which leaped precipitously downwards like mountain streams, zig-zagging like a dog’s-tooth pattern, shingled with loose stones, whose unseen end might be a village round some sharp turn, or a cove by the sea, or a field path running to a farm, or merely the foot of one hill and the beginning of the steep pull up the next.  Coast roads in Cornwall