y 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.

It could not be beautiful. A plain of mud could not be beautiful. Yet
the mind could dwell contentedly on this new and curious estate of
nature, this substance that was neither earth nor water, this place that
was neither land nor sea. It had its own colours: in the shadow of the
great couchant cloud whose mane was brassy with sunshine that had lodged
in the upper air it was purple; otherwise it was brown; and where the
light lay it was as bright as polished steel, yet giving in its
brightness some indication of its sucking softness. It had its own
strange scenery; it had its undulations and its fissures, and between
deep, rounded, shining banks, a course marked here and there by the
stripped white ghosts of sapling trees, a winding river flowed out to
the far-off channel of the estuary which lay a grey bar under the dark
line of the Kentish hills.

It supported its own life; hundreds of black fishing-boats and some
large vessels leaned this way and that, high and dry on the mud, like
flies stuck on a window-pane, and up on the river, whose waters were now
flowing from the sea to the land, men came in dingeys, not rowing, but
bending their bodies indolently and without effort, because they were
back-watering with the tide, so that their swift advance looked as if it
were made easy by sorcery. They slackened speed before they came to the
wharf, which just here by the station jutted out in a grey bastion
surmounted by the minatory finger of a derrick, and some of them climbed
out and put round baskets full of shining fish upon their heads, and,
walking struttingly to brake their heavy boots on the slippery mud,
followed a wet track up to the cinderpath. They looked stunted and
fantastic like Oriental chessmen. It was strange, but this place had the
quality of beauty. It laid a finger on the heart. Moreover, it had a
solemn quality of importance. It was as if this was the primeval ooze
from which the first life stirred and crawled landwards to begin to make
this a memorable star.

Again the place seemed curiously like Marion. It might well have been
that to make her a god had modelled a figure in this estuary mud and
breathed on it, so much, in her sallow colouring and the heavy
impassivity whi