“Hearing the waves in the middle of the night he saddled a horse and rode to the sea. Who was it, Bart, who rode to the sea?”

He was reading.

“You can’t expect it brought to your door in a pail of water,” said Mrs. Swithin, “as I remember when we were children, living in a house by the sea. Lobsters, fresh from the lobster pots. How they pinched the stick cook gave them! And salmon. You know if they’re fresh because they have lice in their scales.”

Bartholomew nodded. A fact that was. He remembered, the house by the sea. And the lobster.

They were bringing up nets full of fish from the sea; but Isa was seeing—the garden, variable as the forecast said, in the light breeze. Again, the children passed, and she tapped on the window and blew them a kiss. In the drone of the garden it went unheeded.

“Are we really,” she said, turning round, “a hundred miles from the sea?”

“Thirty-five only,” her father-inlaw said, as if he had whipped a tape measure from his pocket and measured it exactly.

“It seems more,” said Isa. “It seems from the terrace as if the land went on for ever and ever.”

“Once there was no sea,” said Mrs. Swithin. “No sea at all between us and the continent. I was reading that in a book this morning. There were rhododendrons in the Strand; and mammoths in Piccadilly.”

“When we were savages,” said Isa.

Then she remembered; her dentist had told her that savages could perform very skilful operations on the brain. Savages had false teeth, he said. False teeth were invented, she thought he said, in the time of the Pharaohs.

“At least so my dentist told me,” she concluded.

“Which man d’you go to now?” Mrs. Swithin asked her.

“The same old couple; Batty and Bates in Sloane Street.”

“And Mr. Batty told you they had false teeth in the time of the Pharaohs?” Mrs. Swithin pondered.

“Batty? Oh not Batty. Bates,” Isa corrected her.

Batty, she recalled, only talked about Royalty. Batty, she told Mrs. Swithin, had a patient a Princess.

“So he kept me waiting well over an hour. And you know, when one’s a child, how long that seems.”

“Marriages with cousins,” said Mrs. Swithin, “can’t be good for the teeth.”

Bart put his finger inside his mouth and projected the upper row outside his lips. They were false. Yet, he said, the Olivers hadn’t married cousins. The Olivers couldn’t trace their descent for more than two or three hundred years. But the Swithins could.