attacked these pursuits with tireless zeal. She liked sweeping, dusting, polishing brasses, and making her house as fresh as the sea breezes that blew through it. She liked to brew and bake; to sniff browning pie crust and the warm spiciness of ginger cookies. Keen pleasure came to her when she surveyed spotless beds, square at the corners and covered with immaculate counterpanes. She found peace and refreshment in softened lights, flowers, the glow of driftwood fires.

As for the more strenuous tasks connected with homemaking, they served as natural and pleasurable vents for her surplus energy. She revelled in painting, papering, shingling; and the solution of the balking enigmas presented by plumbing, chimneys, drains and furnaces.

If there lingered deep within her heart vague, unsatisfied yearnings, Marcia resolutely held over these filmy imaginings a tight rein. To be busy—that[22] was her gospel. She never allowed herself to remain idle for any great length of time. To prescribe the remedy and faithfully apply it was no hardship to one whose active physique and abounding vigor demanded an abundance of exercise. Like an athlete set to run a race, she gloried in her physical strength.

[22]

When she tramped the shore, the wind blowing her hair and the rich blood pulsing in her cheeks; when her muscles stretched taut beneath an oar or shot out against the resistance of the tide, a feeling of unity with a power greater than herself caught her up, thrilling every fibre of her being. She was never unsatisfied then. She felt herself to be part of a force mighty and infinite—a happy, throbbing part. Today, as she moved swiftly about the house and her deft hands made tidy the rooms, she had that sense of being in step with the world.

The morning, crisp with an easterly breeze, had stirred the sea into a swell that rose rhythmically in measureless, breathing immensity far away to its clear-cut, sapphire horizon. The sands had never glistened more white; the surf never curled at her doorway in a prettier, more feathery line. On the ocean side, where winter's lashing storms had thrown up a protecting phalanx of dunes, the coarse grasses she had sown to hold them tossed in the wind, while from the Point, where her snowy domains dipped into more turbulent waters, she could hear the grat[23]ing roar of pebbles mingle with the crash of heavier breakers.

[23]

It all spoke to her of home—home as she had known it from childhood—as her 

 Prev. P 11/193 next