The next morning all were up at eight and picking strawberries for breakfast. The prolonged and vociferous music of the horn had precluded all hope of laziness, and the late seekers after sleep were obliged to turn out with the best grace possible. A plunge in the sea had animated the men for the day, and the women were very fresh and amiable.

After breakfast they scattered about the hills and beach. It was a cloudless dark-blue day. The air was warm and dry. The bleak sand dunes were reclaimed for a brief season by the vivid green of willow and oak, the fields of purple lupin and yellow poppy; the trade winds were elsewhere, and the vegetation of San Francisco enjoyed its brief span of life. A ship with all her sails spread drifted, sleepily, over the bar.

Thorpe and Nina climbed an eminence from which they could see the Mission Dolores, far on the right, the smoke curling languidly from its great chimneys; the square Presidio of romantic memories and prosaic present; the distant city, whose loud feverish pulse they fancied they could hear.

They sat down under a tree. Nina took off her hat, and threw back her head. “I think I am the re-embodiment of some pagan ancestor,” she said. “On days like this, I care nothing for a single responsibility in life, nor for what to-morrow will bring, nor for a religion nor a creed, nor for the least nor greatest that civilisation has accomplished. I don’t even long for Europe and the higher intellectual life. It is enough that I am alive, that my eyes see only beauty, and my skin feels warmth. I worship the sun and the sky and the flowers and the trees and the sea, above all the warm quick atmosphere. They seem to me the only things worth loving.”

“They are not the only things you love, however.”

“No, I love you and my father. I hate my mother. But I always manage to forget her existence when I am off like this, and she is out of my sight—”

“Why do you hate your mother?”

“That is one of the things you are not to know yet. This week you are to hear nothing that is not pleasant. I wish you to feel like a pagan, too.”

“I do. Some of your mandates are very easy to observe. We are reasonably sympathetic on more points than one.”

“We will imagine that all life is to be like this week—only no allusion is to be made during this week to the future, and no allusion in the future to this week.”

“I will do all I can to respect your wishes as to the first. The second is too ridiculous to notice. We will settle all that when the time comes.”

To this she vouchsafed no reply, but peered up into the boughs. Her expression changed after a moment; it became impersonal, and her eyes hardened as they always did when her mind alone was at work.

“So far, California has evolved no literature,” she said. “When it does, I don’t doubt it will be a literature of light and charm and comedy—and pleasurable pathos. Writers will continue to go to the dreary moorlands, the dun-coloured skies of England for tragedy settings, and for the atmosphere of tradition and history. It will be hard for any writer who has travelled over the wonderful mountains and valleys of California—you have only seen the worst of it so far—to imagine tragedy in a land of such exultant beauty, under a sun that shines in a blue sky for eight months of the year. Fancy Emily BrontË writing ‘Wuthering Heights’ in California! The setting is all wrong for anything deeper than the picturesque crimes of desperadoes. But it is the very contrast, this very accompaniment of unreality, that makes our tragedies the harder to bear. I have thought sometimes that if I could come out here on a furious day in winter, and wander about the sand hills by myself, I’d feel as if I had a better right to be miserable—”

“I thought we were to have no more such hints this week. I am tired of innuendoes. As I have remarked before, you take an unfair advantage. Let down your hair. It looks full of gold and red in this light, and I want to see it spread out in the sun.”

“Very well, put my hairpins in your pocket. Take it down yourself, and don’t pull, on your life.”

---