And sometimes in those hours it seemed to Rachael that she was no more in the great scheme of things than one of these myriad gulls, than one of the grains of sand through which she ran her white, unringed fingers.  Clarence was a dream, Belvedere Bay was a dream; it was all a hazy, dim memory now:  the cards and the cocktails, the dancing and tennis, the powder and lip-red in hot rooms and about glittering dinner tables.  What a hurry and bustle and rush it all was—­for nothing.  The only actualities were the white sand and the cool green water, and the summer sun beating down warmly upon her bare head.

She awakened every morning in a large, bright, bare room whose three big windows looked into rustling maple boughs.  The steady rushing of surf could be heard just beyond the maples.  Sometimes a soft fog wrapped the trees and the lawn in its pale folds, and the bell down at the lighthouse ding-donged through the whole warm, silent morning, but more often there was sunshine, and Rachael took her book to the beach, got into her stiff, dry bathing suit, in a small, hot bathhouse furnished only by a plank bench and a few rusty nails, and plunged into the delicious breakers she loved so well.  Busy babies, digging on the beach, befriended her, and she grew to love their sudden tears and more sudden laughter, their stammered confidences, and the touch of their warm, sandy little hands.  She became an adept at pinning up their tiny bagging undergarments, and at disentangling hat elastics from the soft hair at the back of moist little necks.  If a mother occasionally showed signs of friendliness, Rachael accepted the overture pleasantly, but managed to wander next day to some other part of the beach, and so evade the definite beginning of a friendship.

The warm sunshine, flavored by the salty sea, soaked into her very bones.  Everything about Quaker Bridge was bare, and worn, and clean; nothing was crowded, or hurried, or false.  Barren dunes, and white, bleaching sand, colorless little houses facing the elm-lined main street, colorless planks outlining the road to the water; the monotonous austerity, the pure severity of the little ocean village was full of satisfying charm for her.  If she climbed a sandy rise beyond Mrs. Dimmick’s cottage, and faced the north, she could see the white roadway, winding down to Clark’s Bar, where the ocean fretted year after year to free the waters of the bay only twelve feet away.  Beyond on the slope, was the village known as Clark’s Hills, a smother of great trees with a weather-whipped spire and an occasional bit of roof or fence in evidence, to show the habitation of man.

In other directions, facing east or west or south, there was nothing but the sand, and the coarse straggling bushes that rooted in the sand, and the clear blue dome of the sky.  Rachael, whose life had been too crowded, gloried in the honey-scented emptiness of the sand hills, the measureless, heaving surface of the ocean, the dizzying breadth and space in which, an infinitesimal speck, she moved.