The
ripeness of summer lay upon the land, and yet there was nothing in the
country Basil Ransom traversed that seemed susceptible of maturity;
nothing but the apples in the little tough, dense orchards, which gave a
suggestion of sour fruition here and there, and the tall, bright
goldenrod at the bottom of the bare stone dykes. There were no fields of
yellow grain; only here and there a crop of brown hay. But there was a
kind of soft scrubbiness in the landscape, and a sweetness begotten of
low horizons, of mild air, with a possibility of summer haze, of
unregarded inlets where on August mornings the water must be brightly
blue. Ransom had heard that the Cape was the Italy, so to speak, of
Massachusetts; it had been described to him as the drowsy Cape, the
languid Cape, the Cape not of storms, but of eternal peace. He knew that
the Bostonians had been drawn thither, for the hot weeks, by its
sedative influence, by the conviction that its toneless air would
minister to perfect rest. In a career in which there was so much nervous
excitement as in theirs they had no wish to be wound up when they went
out of town; they were sufficiently wound up at all times by the sense
of all their sex had been through. They wanted to live idly, to unbend
and lie in hammocks, and also to keep out of the crowd, the rush of the
watering-place. Ransom could see there was no crowd at Marmion, as soon
as he got there, though indeed there was a rush, which directed itself
to the only vehicle in waiting outside of the small, lonely, hut-like
station, so distant from the village that, as far as one looked along
the sandy, sketchy road which was supposed to lead to it, one saw only
an empty land on either side.
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