I perceive that Carlotta is becoming an occupation.  Well, she is quite as profitable as collecting postage-stamps, or golf, or amateur photography.

I have spent a pleasant month in this little place.  It is the mouth of a gorge in the midst of a cliff-bound coast.  The bay, but a quarter of a mile in sweep, is shut in at each end by a projecting wall of cliff cut by a natural arch.  Half the shingle beach is given up to fisherfolk and their boats and tarred Noah’s arks where they keep their nets.  The other half suddenly rises into a digue or terrace on which is built a primitive casino, and below the terrace are the bathing-cabins.  We are staying at the most spotlessly clean of all clean French hotels.  There are no carpets on the stairs; but if one mounts them in muddy boots, an untiring chambermaid emerges from a lair below, with hot water and scrubbing-brush and smilingly removes the traces of one’s passage.  Carlotta and Antoinette have adjoining rooms in the main building.  I inhabit the annexe, sleeping in a quaint, clean, bare little chamber with a balconied window that looks over the Noah’s Arks and the fishing-smacks and fisherfolk, away out to sea.  This morning as I lay in bed I saw our Channel fleet lie along the arc of the horizon.

Antoinette dwells in continuous rapture at being in France again.  Carlotta assures me that the smile does not leave her great red face even as she sleeps of nights.  It is a little jest between us.  She peeped in once to see.  The good soul has filled herself up with French conversation as a starving hen gorges herself with corn.  She has scraped acquaintance with every washerwoman, fish-wife, marchande, bathing woman and domestic servant on the beach.  She is on intimate terms with the whole male native population.  When the three of us happen to walk together it is a triumphal progress of bows and grins and nods.  At first I thought it was I for whom this homage was intended.  I was soon undeceived.  It was Antoinette.  She loves to parade Carlotta before her friends.  I came upon her once entertaining an admiring audience in Carlotta’s presence with a detailed description of that young woman’s physical perfections—­a description which was marked by a singular lack of reticence.  The time of her glory is the bathing hour, when she accompanies Carlotta from her cabin to the water’s edge, divests her of peignoir and espadrilles, but before revealing her to fashionable Etretat, casts a preliminary glance around, as who should say:  “Prepare all men and women for the dazzling goddess I am about to unveil.”  Carlotta is undoubtedly bewitching in her bathing costume, and enjoys a little triumph of beauty.  People fall into a natural group in order to look at her, while I, sitting on a camp-stool in my white ducks and pink shirt and smoking a cigarette, cannot repress a complacent pride of ownership.  I do not object to her flicking her wet fingers at me when she comes dripping out of the sea; and I do not even reproach her when she puts her foot upon my sartorially immaculate knee, to show me a pebble-cut on her glistening pink sole.