Now the train ran slower, and it could be seen that the line had been driven violently through the high street with no decent clearance, for to its left it could be seen that it was overhung by the backs of cottages, and on its right was the cobbled roadway on which walked bearded men in jerseys and top boots and women with that look of brine rather than bloom which is characteristic of fishing-villages.  It was a fairly continuous street of huddled houses and drysalters’ shops, with their stock of thigh-long boots and lanthorns and sou’-westers heaped behind small dark panes, and here and there came quays, with whitened cottages and trim gardens facing dingy wharf-offices over paved squares set about the edge with capstans, and beyond a Thames barge showing its furled red sail against a vista of shining mud-flats and the vast sky that belonged to this district.  This hard, bright, clouded day, which dwelt on the grey in all things, even in the rough grass, made all look brittle and trivial and, however old, still unhistoric.  It could be imagined that the people who lived under this immense sky might come to lose the common human sense of their own supreme importance, and to suspect themselves as being of no more account than the fishes which lie at the bottom of the channel; and might look up at the great cloud galleons floating above and wonder if these had not for ship’s company beings that would be to them as men are to fishes.  It was a place, Ellen saw, that might well have engendered such a curious vigorous lethargy as Marion’s.  Its breezes were clean enough to nourish strength, but there was something about the proportions of the scene that would breed scepticism concerning the value of all activities.

To see things in terms of Marion was weak, and a distraction from delight.  She could neither behold things for their own sake, as she had up till this autumn, nor for Richard’s sake, as she had till yesterday evening.  But she was forced to wonder about this woman who had been able to be Richard’s mother and who was yet so little what one approved of, and who yet again was so picturesque that one had to watch her with pleasant intensity that was not usually associated with dislike.  Even when she looked on the astonishing scene that lay before her when they stepped on to the platform at Roothing station she was distracted from her astonishment by a sense that she would afterwards maintain an argument on the subject with Marion.  The surroundings were ignobly ugly, as eggshells and scraps of newspaper trodden into waste ground are ugly.  She was prepared to tell Marion so, though it was her own town.  There had not been sufficient space to build a station with the up and down platforms facing each other, so the up platform was further back, facing the harbour, and this down platform was overshadowed on its landward side by smoke-grimed cottages and tenements which rose on high ground in a peak of squalor.  Seawards one looked over a goods-siding, where there stood a few wagons of cockle-shells and a cinderpath esplanade on to a vast plain of mud.