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 b