ook his way,
the sole pedestrian in the group that had quitted the train, in the wake
of the overladen carry-all. It helped him to enjoy the first country
walk he had had for many months, for more than months, for years, that
the reflexion was forced upon him as he went (the mild, vague scenery,
just beginning to be dim with twilight, suggested it at every step) that
the two young women who constituted, at Marmion, his whole prefigurement
of a social circle, must, in such a locality as that, be taking a
regular holiday. The sense of all the wrongs they had still to redress
must be lighter there than it was in Boston; the ardent young man had,
for the hour, an ingenuous hope that they had left their opinions in the
city. He liked the very smell of the soil as he wandered along; cool,
soft whiffs of evening met him at bends of the road which disclosed very
little more--unless it might be a band of straight-stemmed woodland,
keeping, a little, the red glow from the west, or (as he went further)
an old house, shingled all over, grey and slightly collapsing, which
looked down at him from a steep bank, at the top of wooden steps. He was
already refreshed; he had tasted the breath of nature, measured his long
grind in New York, without a vacation, with the repetition of the daily
movement up and down the long, straight, maddening city, like a bucket
in a well or a shuttle in a loom.

He lit his cigar in the office of the hotel--a small room on the right
of the door, where a "register," meagrely inscribed, led a terribly
public life on the little bare desk, and got its pages dogs'-eared
before they were covered. Local worthies, of a vague identity, used to
lounge there, as Ransom perceived the next day, by the hour. They tipped
back their chairs against the wall, seldom spoke, and might have been
supposed, with their converging vision, to be watching something out of
the window, if there had been anything at Marmion to watch. Sometimes
one of them got up and went to the desk, on which he leaned his elbows,
hunching a pair of sloping shoulders to an uncollared neck. For the
fiftieth time he perused the fly-blown page of the recording volume,
where the names followed each other with such jumps of date. The others
watched him while he did so--or contemplated in silence some "guest" of
the hostelry, when such a personage entered the place with an air of
appealing from the general irresponsibility of the establishment and
found no o