Ransom regarded the place as a town because Doctor Prance
had called it one; but it was a town where you smelt the breath of the
hay in the streets and you might gather blackberries in the principal
square. The houses looked at each other across the grass--low, rusty,
crooked, distended houses, with dry, cracked faces and the dim eyes of
small-paned, stiffly-sliding windows. Their little door-yards bristled
with rank, old-fashioned flowers, mostly yellow; and on the quarter that
stood back from the sea the fields sloped upward, and the woods in which
they presently lost themselves looked down over the roofs. Bolts and
bars were not a part of the domestic machinery of Marmion, and the
responsive menial, receiving the visitor on the threshold, was a
creature rather desired than definitely possessed; so that Basil Ransom
found Miss Chancellor's house-door gaping wide (as he had seen it the
night before), and destitute even of a knocker or a bell-handle. From
where he stood in the porch he could see the whole of the little
sitting-room on the left of the hall--see that it stretched straight
through to the back windows; that it was garnished with photographs of
foreign works of art, pinned upon the walls, and enriched with a piano
and other little extemporised embellishments, such as ingenious women
lavish upon the houses they hire for a few weeks. Verena told him
afterwards that Olive had taken her cottage furnished, but that the
paucity of chairs and tables and bedsteads was such that their little
party used almost to sit down, to lie down, in turn.
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