A
tiny brook ran with a sharp, silvery tinkle on its farther edge and it was
bordered by a light barrier of white railing. Beyond were spacious,
half-cultivated meadows, stretched out for miles in the lap of low-lying
hills.
Serene yet inhuman the landscape looked, a background to the thinnest of
histories, significant only of its own dreaming solitude; and the village,
among its elms, a little farther on, suggested the barest past, the most
barren future. The road led on into its main street, where the elms made
a stately avenue, arching over scattered frame houses of buff and gray
and white. Imogen told Sir Basil that some of these houses were old, and
pointed out an austere classic facade with pediment and pillars; explained
to him, too, the pathetic condition of so much of abandoned New England.
Sir Basil was thinking more of her last words in the woods than of local
color, but he had, while he listened, a fairly definite impression of
pinchbeck shops; of shabby awnings slanting in the sunlight over heaps of
tumbled fruit and vegetables; of "buggies," slip-shod, with dust-whitened
wheels, the long-tailed, long-maned, slightly harnessed horses hitched to
posts along the pavements. The faces that passed were indolent yet eager.
The jaws of many worked mechanically at some unappeasing task of
mastication.
Sir Basil had traveled since his arrival in America, had seen the luxuries
of the Atlantic seacoast, the purposeful energy of Chicago, California's
Eden-like abundance, and had seen other New England villages where beauty
was cherished and made permanent.
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