She was more or less of a locked cabinet to me. I tried her with the
two or three keys which I had, but finding that none of them fitted,
I took no more pains about her.
One Sunday we determined upon a holiday. It was a bold adventure for
us, but we had made up our minds. There was an excursion train to
Hastings, and accordingly Ellen, Marie, and myself were at London
Bridge Station early in the morning. It was a lovely summer's day in
mid-July. The journey down was uncomfortable enough in consequence
of the heat and dust, but we heeded neither one nor the other in the
hope of seeing the sea. We reached Hastings at about eleven o'clock,
and strolled westwards towards Bexhill. Our pleasure was exquisite.
Who can tell, save the imprisoned Londoner, the joy of walking on the
clean sea-sand! What a delight that was, to say nothing of the
beauty of the scenery! To be free of the litter and filth of a
London suburb, of its broken hedges, its brickbats, its torn
advertisements, its worn and trampled grass in fields half given over
to the speculative builder: in place of this, to tread the
immaculate shore over which breathed a wind not charged with soot; to
replace the dull, shrouding obscurity of the smoke by a distance so
distinct that the masts of the ships whose hulls were buried below
the horizon were visible--all this was perfect bliss.
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