ne but the village-philosophers to address himself to. It was
an establishment conducted by invisible, elusive agencies; they had a
kind of stronghold in the dining-room, which was kept locked at all but
sacramental hours. There was a tradition that a "boy" exercised some
tutelary function as regards the crumpled register; but when he was
inquired about, it was usually elicited from the impartial circle in the
office either that he was somewhere round or that he had gone a-fishing.
Except the haughty waitress who has just been mentioned as giving Ransom
his supper, and who only emerged at meal-times from her mystic
seclusion, this impalpable youth was the single person on the premises
who represented domestic service. Anxious lady-boarders, wrapped in
shawls, were seen waiting for him, as if he had been the doctor, on
horse-hair rocking-chairs, in the little public parlour; others peered
vaguely out of back doors and windows, thinking that if he were
somewhere round they might see him. Sometimes people went to the door of
the dining-room and tried it, shaking it a little, timidly, to see if it
would yield; then, finding it fast, came away, looking, if they had been
observed, shy and snubbed, at their fellows. Some of them went so far as
to say that they didn't think it was a very good hotel.

Ransom, however, didn't much care whether it were good or not; he hadn't
come to Marmion for the love of the hotel. Now that he had got there,
however, he didn't know exactly what to do; his course seemed rather
less easy than it had done when, suddenly, the night before, tired, sick
of the city-air, and hungry for a holiday, he decided to take the next
morning's train to Boston, and there take another to the shores of
Buzzard's Bay. The hotel itself offered few resources; the inmates were
not numerous; they moved about a little outside, on the small piazza and
in the rough yard which interposed between the house and the road, and
then they dropped off into the unmitigated dusk. This element, touched
only in two or three places by a far-away dim glimmer, presented itself
to Ransom as his sole entertainment. Though it was pervaded by that
curious, pure, earthy smell which in New England, in summer, hangs in
the nocturnal air, Ransom bethought himself that the place might be a
little dull for persons who had not come to it, as he had, to take
possession of Verena Tarrant. The unfriendly inn, which suggested
dreadfully to Ransom (he de