“Oh, no, it’s pleasant to be on innocent territory, with no human beings living on it.  There was a feeling, so far as I can remember it, of extraordinary freedom and lightness.”  She spoke with a sincere cynicism, an easy grimness that appeared quite dreadful to Ellen.  The girl looked appealingly at her, asking her not to give the sanction of her impressive personality to such hopelessness about life, but had the ill luck to catch her in the act of a practical demonstration of her dislike for her fellow-creatures.  Now that the train had puffed out of the station the station-master, a silver-haired old man with a red face on which amiability clung like a lather, had come to Marion’s side and was saying that he had not seen her for a long time, and asking how Richard was and when he was coming back.  Ellen thought this was very kind of him, but Marion evidently found it tiresome, and hardly troubled to conceal the fact, walking rather more quickly along the platform than the old man could manage and giving no more answer to his questions than a vague smiling “Hum.”  Ellen hoped that the poor old man was not offended.

She found something dubious, too, about the lack of apology with which Marion led her into the squalor outside the station, over the level crossing, with its cobblestones veined with coal-dust, past the fish-shop hung with the horrid bleeding frills of skate, and the barber’s shop that also sold journals, which stood with unreluctant posters at the exact point where newspapers and flypapers meet; and up the winding road, which sent a trail of square red villas with broken prams standing in unplanted or unweeded gardens up the hill in the direction of the church and the castle they had passed in the train.  But surely she ought to have apologised for bringing a girl reared in Edinburgh to a place like this.  On one of the gates they passed was written “Hiemath,” and there was something very characteristic of the jerry-built and decaying place in the cheap sentiment that had been too slovenly to spell its own name correctly.  Yet to the left, over the housetops of foul black streets running upwards from the railway-lines, there shone the great silver plain, and afar off a channel set with white sailing-ships and steamers, and dark majestic hills.  But because of the quality of the place, and perhaps of her guide, she did not want to recognise its beauty.

When they came to a cross-roads that followed westward along the crest of the hill she would hardly admit to herself that this was better, that this was indeed right in a unique way, and that the dignified houses of white marl and oak on one side of the road and the public lawns on the other were quite good for England.  She was not softened by Marion’s proud mutter:  “It’s jolly in spring, seeing the blue sea through the gap in the may hedge.  And on the other side of the hedge there’s one of those old grass roads.  They used to say they were Roman, but they’re far older.  Older