The love-making, too, is devoid of subtlety. When you
see--as I saw last Bank Holiday on Ramsgate beach--Edwin and Angelina
asleep in each other's arms, the situation strikes you as too simple for
analysis. It is like the loves of the elements, or the propensity of
carbon to combine with oxygen. An even more idyllic couple I came upon
prone amid the poppies on the cliff hard by, absorbing the peace and the
sunshine, steeping themselves in the calm of Nature after the finest
Wordsworthian manner. But presently there is the roll of a drum, and the
scream of a fife in distress rises from below, and Angelina pricks up her
ears. "I wish they'd come up 'ere," she murmurs wistfully; "I'd jump up
like steam; I could just do a dance."
Yet all the same their seclusion among the wild flowers on the edge of
the cliff showed a glimmering of soul. Not theirs the hankering for that
strip of sand near the stone pier, which a worthy dame of my acquaintance
once compared to a successful fly-paper. Scientific investigation shows
the congestion at this particular spot to be due to the file of
bathing-machines which blocks the view of the sea from half the beach. To
the bulk of the visitors this yellow patch _is_ Ramsgate, just as a
small, cocoanut-bearing area of Hampstead woodland is the Heath, most of
whose glorious acres have never felt the tread of a donkey or a cheap
tripper.
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