And throughout there are very many people who are not to be forgotten--Stephen, the Cornishman, huge and bearded and bewildered and inarticulate, loving the youngster Peter and the girl he could not have, tramping the hard white roads of England, an outcast for love; Zanti, the "foreigner," always a-quiver with babbling excitement over some new adventure on whose trail he was following; quiet Norah, untidy and pale, yet burning with a love which gave back his fortitude to Peter when it seemed lost; Cardillac, the elegant; Galleon, the great novelist; the kiddies who adored big Peter; Peter’s own son, whom he so terribly loved.
It is a marvellous gallery, and more marvellous, even, is the gallery of scenes, not painted in long and laborious descriptions, but in quick snatches, which show the fact that Walpole watches sky and wind and tree as does no other novelist.
Do you not come from the heart of dusty country back to the sea again as you read this? If you do not, then you do not love the sea, whose very breath is here in this description from _Fortitude_:
"They were at the top of the hill now. The sea broke upon them with an instant menacing roar. Between them and this violence there was now only moorland, rough with gorse bushes, uneven with little pits of sand, scented with sea pinks, with stony tracks here and there where the moonlight touched it."
Put this with the first lines in _Maradick at Forty_ and you have a whole seaside holiday:
"The gray twilight gives to the long, pale stretches of sand the sense of something strangely unreal. As far as the eye can reach, it curves out into the mist, the last vanishing garments of some fleeing ghost. The sea comes smoothly, quite silently, over the breast of it; there is a trembling whisper as it catches the highest stretch of sand and drags it for a moment down the slope; then, with a little sigh, creeps back again a defeated lover."
Or, if you will have the soul of the gay city, here it is in a quotation from _Fortitude_:
"The street stirred with the pattering of dogs out for an airing. The light slid down the sky--voices rang in the clear air softly as though the dying day besought them to be tender. The colours of the shops, of the green trees, of slim and beautifully dressed houses, were powdered with gold-dust; the church in Sloane Square began to ring its bells."