s all inquiries, and asks ridiculous rents. And this
silence, or its keeper, is said to have become enormously rich over
the new town.

The shareholders in the St. Sennans Hotel, Limited, cannot have become
rich. If they had, surely they would provide something better for a
hungry paying supplicant than a scorched greasy chop, inflamed at the
core, and glass bottles containing a little pellucid liquid that parts
with its carbon dioxide before you can effect a compromise with the
cork, which pushes in, but not so as to attain its ideal. So your
Seltzer water doesn't pour fast enough to fizz outside the bottle,
and your heart is sad. Of course, you can have wine, if you come to
that, for look at the wine-list! Only the company's ideas of the value
of wine are not limited, and if you decide not to be sordid, and order
a three-shilling bottle of Medoc, you will find its contents to be
very limited indeed. But why say more than that it is an enormous
hotel at the seaside? You know all about them, and what it feels like
in rainy weather, when the fat gentleman has got to-day's "Times," and
means to read all through the advertisement-column before he gives up
the leaders, and you have to spend your time turning over thick and
shiny snap-shot journals with a surfeit of pictures in them; or the
Real Lady, or the Ladylike Lady, or the Titled Lady, the portraits of
whom--one or other of them--sweep in curves about their folio pages;
and, while they fascinate you, make you feel that you would falter on
the threshold of matrimony if only because they couldn't possibly take
nourishment. Would not the discomfort of meals eaten with a companion
who could swallow nothing justify a divorce _a mensa_?

A six-shilling volume might be written about the New Hotel, with an
execration on every page. Don't let us have anything to do with it,
but keep as much as possible at the Sea Houses under the cliff, which
constitute the only St. Sennans necessary to this story. We shall be
able to do so, because when Mrs. and Mr. Fenwick and their daughter
went for a walk they always went up the cliff-pathway, which had steps
cut in the chalk, past the boat upside down, where new-laid eggs could
be bought from a coastguard's wife. And this path avoided the New Town
altogether, and took them straight to the cliff-track that skirted
growing wheat and blazing poppies till you began to climb the smooth
hill-pasture the foolish wheat had encroached upon in the