... I was a boy of twelve or thirteen. My
people took me one summer to Dymchurch in Romney Marsh; in those days
before the automobile had made the Marsh accessible to the Hythe and
Folkestone crowds, it was a little old forgotten silent wind-bitten
village crouching under the lee of the great sea wall. At low water
there were miles of sand as smooth and shining as the skin of a savage
brown woman. Shining and with a texture--the very same. And one day as I
was mucking about by myself on the beach, boy fashion,--there were some
ribs of a wrecked boat buried in the sand near a groin and I was busy
with them--a girl ran out from a tent high up on the beach and across
the sands to the water. She was dressed in a tight bathing dress and
not in the clumsy skirts and frills that it was the custom to inflict
on women in those days. Her hair was tied up in a blue handkerchief. She
ran swiftly and gracefully, intent upon the white line of foam ahead. I
can still remember how the sunlight touched her round neck and cheek as
she went past me. She was the loveliest, most shapely thing I have
ever seen--to this day. She lifted up her arms and thrust through the
dazzling white and green breakers and plunged into the water and swam;
she swam straight out for a long way as it seemed to me, and presently
came in and passed me again on her way back to her tent, light and
swift and sure.
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