Dirk Hendrik came and sat down beside her. He had large popping eyes behind his glasses and thick white hair. He spoke to her about the sea. He was Dutch and she felt that he enjoyed speaking of the sea in terms of battle. Somewhere, she supposed, he had come to have a Hemmingway sort of love for a merciless and uncompromising enemy such as this one the Dutch knew so well. Across the room she heard the doctor giggle again. He was repeating his fish story to a newcomer. She couldn't imagine why it was all right for Mexicans to eat sail fishes if New York tourists simply could not.

"Fourteen hundred were killed two years ago," the Dutchman was saying of his country and the fight against the water.

"Yes," Andrea said, "I remember the newsreels."

"Much sorrow," the man said then, simply.

"Yes," Andrea answered and did not look at him.

Outside the water smashed against the rocks and sent walls of spray shooting up to the houses atop the bluff. Here and there different ones in the room commented on the tide and went on to speak of other things.

Pip had been terribly romantic about the sea. She had never been very close to it and never in it and had loved it or rather been in love with it the way those who never know it can sometimes be. In her books she had always caused someone to make their way to some ocean or other where they would regard it and the gulls and be full of meditation. Andrea had always teased her unmercifully about it. Sometimes it was all right-well written little passages that actually had something to do with what was passing in the story. But more often they were jammed in little sequences quite full of clichéd observations and moods which Andrea had tried to insist were beneath Pip's talents. But Pip had had a marvelous and reckless defiance about it: she would sit with the black rimmed glasses caught atop the mixed grey hair and grin at Andrea throughout the criticism and then throw up her hands and say, "But what can I do, Sweet? It's a weakness of mine!" And to make seriousness absolutely impossible, she would reach out, invariably, and pinch Andrea's face together and say, "Like you." In the hospital she had taken, for the first time in her life, to writing poetry. Later Andrea had found that all of it had included some image of the sea. The sea. Andrea tilted the glass suddenly and let the last of the drink run swiftly in between her lips.

The Dutchman was speaking of a piece of sculpture which had especially impressed him at the opening. Andrea heard his words at the back of her mind and nodded her head to his views.

"How," Pip had asked her suddenly the day they came from the doctor pierced with the results of the tests and staggering under the human will to resist the absorption of a terrible fact when it is first presented, "How can one die at forty?" She was sitting across the table from Andrea, her mouth open a little, the incredulity on her face almost bitterly comical; the question wildly clinical as though they were discussing someone else entirely. And Andrea had folded over then, quite beyond her power to help herself, in a total seizure of pure grief and horror which shook her entire body. Pip had put her to bed, in fact. And then later said the terrible things to her.

It was like Pip to say the things she did: "Andrea, do not ever get to thinking that it is worse for you. That's really a lot of nonsense, Sweet. It shall be worst of all for me. I shall have the God-awful pain of it, you know. Do not ever fall to pitying yourself more than me"Andrea had screamed at her for mercy

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