curtained sleeping cars partitioned into narrow kennels where mysterious people lay alone: and the bursting silver plume of its whistle, spirting into the cool night, tearing a jagged rent in silence, shaking the whole membrane of elastic air that enveloped them all, a vibration that came undulating over the glittering bay, over the lonely beaches, trembled beside her and went throbbing away. . . . She hadn't been down to the beach yet, past the rolling dunes that gave her childhood a first sense of fatal solitude. She tried to remember how that shore looked: wideness, sharp air, the exact curved triangle of sails leaning into unseen sweetness of breeze, steep slides of sand over-tufted above by toppling clumps of grass. If one could escape down there and go bathing in moonlight; come back cleansed, triumphant.
The whisper at the window sill startled her. She knew Bunny at once.
"You must get him away. Before it's too late, before he knows."
Joyce understood perfectly; so perfectly it didn't seem necessary to say anything. This was just what she had been telling herself.
She nodded.
"I kept calling him while you were all in the
