Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/82

 traditions and considerable brains behind you. Not like the Potters—upstarts of yesterday!

“Oh, how those women garbled things about poor Ilse. We couldn’t, I suppose, expect a Potter or the wife of a Potter to recognize the sleep-walking scene from. I have told Ilse repeatedly that she ought to see that all doors are shut when she tries it over. She is quite wonderful in it. She was at that charivari—she only said she’d  to go. And as for the moonlight bathing—that was true enough except that we had stitches on. There was nothing dreadful about it. It was perfectly beautiful—though now it is all spoiled and degraded by being dragged about in common gossip. I wish Ilse hadn’t told about it.

“We had gone away up the sandshore for a walk. It was a moonlit night and the sandshore was wonderful. The Wind Woman was rustling in the grasses on the dunes and there was a long, gentle wash of little gleaming waves on the shore. We wanted to bathe, but at first we thought we couldn’t because we didn’t have our bathing dresses. So we sat on the sands and talked of a hundred things. It was real conversation—not just talk. The great gulf stretched out before us, silvery, gleaming, alluring, going farther and farther into the mists of the northern sky. It was like an ocean in ‘fairylands forlorn.’

“I said:

“‘I would like to get into a ship and sail straight out there—out—out—where would I land?’

“‘Anticosti, I expect,’ said Ilse—a bit too prosaically, I thought.

“‘No—no—Ultima Thule, I think,’ I said dreamily. ‘Some beautiful unknown shore where “the rain never falls, and the wind never blows.” Perhaps the country back of the North Wind where Diamond went. One could sail to it over that silver sea on a night like this.’

“‘ was heaven, I think,’ said Ilse.

“Then we talked about immortality, and Ilse said