Their ambulations had brought them to the orchard gate again, but he turned on his heel and said, with what struck her as a curious abandonment of the languor by which he usually asserted to the world that he refused to hurry, “Go and put on your hat and we’ll start at once.”  So they went out and hastened through the buoyant air down to the harbour and along the cinder-track to Prittlebay esplanade, where she forgot everything in astonishment at the new, bright, arbitrary scene.  There was what seemed to her, a citizen of Edinburgh, a comically unhistoric air about the place.  The gaily-coloured rows of neat dwellings 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