“Those are the redshanks.  They’re wading-birds.  When Richard comes he will take you on the sea-wall and show you the redshanks in the little streams among the mud.  They are such queer streams.  Up towards Canfleet there’s a waterfall in the mud, with a fall of several feet.  It looks queer.  These marshes are queer.  And they’re so lonely.  Nobody ever comes here now except the men to see to the cattle.  Even though the railway runs through, they’re quite lonely.  The trains carry clerks and shop-assistants down from their work in London to their houses at New Roothing and Bestcliffe and Prittlebay at night; and they leave in the morning as soon as they’ve had breakfast.  On Sundays they’re too tired to do anything but sit on the cliff and listen to the band playing.  During the week the children are all at school or too young to go further than the recreation grounds.  There’s nothing to bring these people here, and they never come.”

She again struck Ellen as terrifying.  She spoke of the gulf between these joyless lives and the beauty through which they hurled physically night and morning, to the conditions which debarred them from ever visiting it spiritually, with exhilaration and a will that it should continue to exist as long as she could help it.  “But, Ellen, you like lonely country yourself,” she addressed herself.  “You liked the Pentlands for being so lonely.  There’s no difference between you really....”  But indeed there was a difference.  She had liked places to be destitute of any trace of human society because then a lovelier life of the imagination rushed in to fill the vacuum.  Since the engineer had erred who built the reservoirs over by Carlops and had made them useless for that purpose, better things than water came along the stone waterways; meadowsweet choking the disused channel looked like a faery army defiling down to the plains, and locks were empty and dry and white, like chambers of a castle keep, or squares of dark green waters from which at any moment a knight would rise with a weed-hung harp in his arms and a tale of a hundred years in faery-land.

But to this woman the liked thing about loneliness was simply that nobody was there.  Unpeopled earth seemed to her desirable as unadulterated food; the speech of man among the cries of the redshanks would have been to her like sand in the sugar.  They came presently to a knot of trees, round which some boys wrangled in some acting game in which a wigwam built between the shining roots that one of the trees lifted high out of earth evidently played an important part.  Ellen would have liked to walk slowly as they passed them, so as to hear as much as possible of the game, for it looked rather nice, but Marion began to hurry, and broke her serene silence in an affectation of earnest and excited speech so that she need pay as little response to the boys’ doffing of their caps.  There was something at once absurd and menacing about the effect of her disinclination to return these children’s greetings; to Ellen, who was so young that all mature persons seemed to have a vast capital of self-possession, it was like seeing someone rich expressing serious indignation at having to give a beggar a penny.