over with thousands of small promiscuous bungalows, built of everything from patchwork of kerosene tin up to fine red brick and stucco, like Margate. Not far off the Pacific boomed. But fifty yards inland started these bits of swamp, and endless promiscuity of "cottages."
The tram took them five or six miles, to the terminus. This was the end of everywhere, with new "stores"—that is, fly-blown shops with corrugated iron roofs—and with a tram-shelter, and little house-agents' booths plastered with signs—and more "cottages"; that is, bungalows of corrugated iron or brick—and bits of swamp or "lagoon" where the sea had got in and couldn't get out. The happy couple had a drink of sticky ærated waters in one of the "stores," then walked up a wide sand-road dotted on either side with small bungalows, beyond the backs of which lay a whole aura of rusty tin cans chucked out over the back fence. They came to the ridge of sand, and again the pure, long-rolling Pacific.
"I love the sea," said Harriet.
"I wish," said Lovat, "it would send a wave about fifty feet high round the whole coast of Australia."
"You are so bad-tempered," said Harriet. "Why don't you see the lovely things!"
"I do, by contrast."
So they sat on the sands, and he peeled pears and buried the peel in the yellow sand. It was winter, and the shore was almost deserted. But the sun was warm as an English May.
Harriet felt she absolutely must live by the sea, so they wandered along a wide, rutted space of deep sand, looking at the "cottages" on either side. They had impossible names. But in themselves, many of them were really nice. Yet there they stood like so many forlorn chicken-houses, each on its own oblong patch of land, with a fence between it and its neighbour. There was something indescribably weary and dreary about it. The very ground the houses stood on seemed weary and drabbled, almost asking for rusty tin cans. And so many pleasant little bungalows set there in an improvised road, wide and weary—and then the effort had lapsed. The tin shacks were almost a relief. They did not call for geraniums and lobelias, as did the pretty Hampstead Garden Suburb "cottages." And
