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Updated: May 19, 2025
To break the critical current of her thoughts she asked, "What's that church up there?" "It's Roothing Church. It's very old. It's a famous landmark." "But what's that white thing beside it?" "Oh, that!" said Marion, looking seawards. "That is the tomb of Richard's father." "Indeed," breathed Ellen uncomfortably.
Then she passed on between the dark box-bushes, and, at a point just before the path debouched on the lawn, she stopped once again and considered the quiet evening landscape, and made a mental note that that must be the tower of one of the Roothing churches that one caught on the sky-line. She looked closer. It was not a mask. It was a face large, smooth, and pink.
I've only to put up my hand behind my ear to feel a scar they gave me thirty years ago when I was hunted down Roothing High Street. But it seems to me that the new-fashioned ideas are as mawkish as the old ones were brutal. And worst of all is this idea about marriage being dreadful." She blushed deeply. "It's not. What you make of it may be, but the thing itself is not.
"They even own Roothing Castle, which is where we're going now, and at the entrance to it they've put up a notice, 'Visitors are requested to assist the Hallelujah Army in keeping the Castle select. ... Intolerable people...." "All the same," said Ellen sturdily, "they may do good."
Then she remembered that it was a habit of the young bloods of Roothing to evade their elders' feeling about Sabbath observance by going in the afternoon to an overlooked wedge of ground that ran into the woods and playing some sort of bat-and-ball game. This must be Sunday.
Most times that Marion passed down Roothing High Street, and saw the old woman sitting knitting in the garden while her old blind husband shuffled happily here and there, they would but bow and smile and look away very quickly.
She had felt a little frightened, for since her stoning in Roothing High Street she had felt fear at any contact with the external world; she knew now that rabies is endemic in human society, and that one can never tell when one may not be bitten by a frothing mouth.
But through the tree-trunks in that direction there came two other boys in search of the ball Ned Turk, who to-day was the station-master at Roothing station, and Bobbie Wickes; and at the sight of her they stood stock-still as George Postgate had done, and, like him, dropped their heads and flushed and lifted lewd faces. A horror came on her.
Even though the railway runs through, they're quite lonely. The trains carry clerks and shop-assistants down from their work in London to their houses at New Roothing and Bestcliffe and Prittlebay at night; and they leave in the morning as soon as they've had breakfast. On Sundays they're too tired to do anything but sit on the cliff and listen to the band playing.
Twice before the dawn she was stoned down Roothing High Street, even as seven years before men looked at her from behind glazed, amused masks; and she had put up her hand to her head and found that a stone had drawn blood; and Mr. Goode's kind voice said something about, "A bit of boys' fun, Mr. Peacey," and she had stared before her at a black, broadclothed bulk.
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