Growing with the viscous light that was invading the sky, there came the solemn, tortured-snake voice of the sea, two miles away, falling in sharp folds upon the mirror-expanses of the beach. In the mysterious out-of-doors she felt forlorn. Their fresh scent and cool, soft leaves reminded her of the morning-time and sunshine.

She touched the white ruffles of the roses. She passed along the path, hesitating at the white rose-bush. A few whiffs of the raw, strong scent of phlox invigorated her. Languidly she looked about her the clumps of white phlox seemed like bushes spread with linen a moth ricochetted over them, and right across the garden.

When she came to herself she was tired for sleep. Then she drank a deep draught of the scent. She bent down to look at the binful of yellow pollen but it only appeared dusky. She put her hand into one white bin: the gold scarcely showed on her fingers by moonlight. They seemed to be stretching in the moonlight. She touched the big, pallid flowers on their petals, then shivered. Only the crudeness of youth was here as yet, and not its triumph – only the sharp calyx-point, the pricking tip of the bud, like spears, and not the paten of the leaf, the chalice of the flower. A purple mist hinted of buds in the tree-tops, and a fainter purple haunted the vistas between the silver and brown boles. It was cold in the Callow – a spinney of silver birches and larches that topped a round hill. Small feckless clouds were hurried across the vast untroubled sky – shepherdless, futile, imponderable – and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures with nothing of their fugitive existence left but a few tears.

Stella gibbons