The youngest baby looked up and saw Maggie standing all alone there, and crowed.Then all the family looked up, the boys suspended their digging, father tilted back his hat, the mother shyly smiled.
Maggie smiled back, and then, overcome by so poignant a feeling of loneliness, tempted, too, almost irresistibly to run down the steps, join them on the sand, build castles, play with the babies, she hurried away lest she should give way.
"I must be pretending at being married," she thought to herself."Idon't feel married at all.I'm not natural.If I were sitting on the sand digging I'd be quite natural.No wonder Grace thinks me tiresome.But how does one get older and grown up? What is one to do?"She did not trust herself to go down to the sands again that summer.
The autumn came, the woods turned to gold, the sea was flurried with rain, and the Church began to fill the horizon.The autumn and the winter were the times of the Church's High Festival.Paul, as though he were aware that he had, during these last months, been hovering about strange places and peering into dark windows, busied himself about the affairs of his parish with an energy that surprised every one.
Maggie was aware of a number of young women of whom before she had been unconscious.Miss Carmichael, Misses Mary and Jane Bethel, Miss Clarice Hendon, Miss Polly Jones...some of these pretty girls, all of them terribly modern, strident, self-assured, scornful, it seemed to Maggie.At first she was frightened of them as she had never been frightened of any one before.They did look at her, of course, as though they thought her strange, and then they soon discovered that she knew nothing at all about life.
Their two chief employments, woven in, as it were, to the web of their church assistance, were Love and Mockery-flirtations, broken engagements, refusals, acceptances, and, on the other hand, jokes about everybody and everything.Maggie soon discovered that Grace was one of their favourite Aunt Sallies; this made her very angry, and she showed so plainly her indignation on the first occasion of their wit that they never laughed at Grace in Maggie's presence again.