that debouched on the esplanade, and the line of hotels and
boarding-houses that faced the sea, were as new as the pantomime songs
of last Christmas or this year's slang. One might conceive them being
designed by architects who knew as little of the past as children know
of death, and painted by fresh-faced people to match themselves, and
there was a romping arbitrariness about the design and decoration of the
place which struck the same note of innocence.

The town council who passed the plans for the Byzantine shoulder the
esplanade thrust out on to the sand on the slender provocation of a
bandstand, the man who had built his hotel with a roof covered with
cupolas and minarets and had called it "Westward Ho!" must, Ellen
thought, be lovely people, like Shakespearean fools. She liked it, too,
when they came to the vulgarer part of the town and the place assumed
the strange ceremented air that a pleasure city wears in winter. The
houses had fallen back, and the esplanade was overhung now by a steep
green slope on which asphalt walks linked shelters, in which no one sat,
and wandered among brown and purple congregations of bare trees, at its
base were scattered wooden chalets and bungalows, which offered to take
the passer-by's photograph or to sell ice-cream. The sea-salt in the air
had licked off the surface of the paint, so that they had a greyish,
spectral appearance. The photographs in the cracked show-cases were
brown and vaporous, and the announcements of vanilla ice-cream were but
breaths of lettering, blown on stained walls. It seemed a place for the
pleasuring of mild, unexigent phantoms, no doubt the ghosts of the
simple people who lived in the other part of the town.

She was amused by it all, and was sorry when they came to the
Thamesmouth Yacht Club, a bungalow glossy with new paint which looked
very opaque among the phantasmic buildings. With its verandah, that was
polished like a deck, and its spotless life-belts and brilliant
port-hole windows, it had the air of a ship which had been exiled to
land but was trying to bear up; and so, too, had the three old captains,
spruce little men, with sea-reflecting eyes and pointed, grizzled
beards, whom Richard brought out of the club after he had got the
boathouse keys. Ellen liked them very much indeed. She had never before
had any chance of seeing the beautiful and generous emotion that old men
who have lived bravely feel for young men whom they see carrying on