Here was Marlowe, and lovely as it was, I kept saying to myself, “Yes, yes, it is delicious, but how terrible it would be to live here! I couldn’t. It’s a dead world. We have passed so far beyond this.” I walked through the pretty streets as smooth and clean as though they had been brushed and between rows of low, gray, winding houses which curved in pretty lines, but for the life of me I could not help swinging between the joy of art for that which is alive and the sorrow for something that is gone and will never be, any more. Everything, everything spoke to me of an older day. These houses--all of them were lower than they need be, grayer than they need be, thicker, older, sadder. I could not think of gas or electricity being used here, although they were, or of bright broad windows, open plumbing, modern street cars, a stock of modern, up-to-date goods, which I am sure they contained. I was impressed by a grave silence which is apathetic to me as nothing else--a profound peace. “I must get out of this,” I said to myself, and yet I was almost hugging myself for joy at the same time.
I remember going into one courtyard where an inn might once have been and finding in there a furniture shop, a tin shop, a store room of some kind and a stable, all invisible from the street. Do you recall Dickens’ description of busy inn scenes? You came into this one under the chamber belonging to a house which was built over the entry way. There was no one visible inside, though a man did cross the court finally with a wheel spoke in his hand. One of the houses or shops had a little circular cupola on it, quite white and pretty and surmounted by a faded weather cock. “How lovely,” I said, “how lovely,” but I was as sad as I could be.
In the stores in the main street were always small, many-paned windows. There were no lights as yet and the rooms into which I peered and the private doors gave glimpses of things which reminded me of the poorest, most backward and desolate sections of our own country.
I saw an automobile here and there, not many, and some girls on bicycles,--not very good looking. Say what you will, you could not find an atmosphere like this in an American town, however small, unless it had already been practically abandoned. It would not contain a contented population of three or four hundred. Instead of saloons I saw “wine and spirit merchants” and also “Mrs. Jane Sawyer, licensed wine and spirit dealer.” The butcher shops were the most American things I saw, because their ruddy goods were all displayed in front with good lights behind, and the next best things were the candy stores. Dressmakers, milliners, grocers, hardware stores, wine shops, anything and everything--were apparently concealed by solid gray walls or at best revealed by small-paned windows. In the fading afternoon I walked about hunting for schools, some fine private houses, some sense of modernness--but no--it was not there. I noticed that in two directions the town came abruptly to an end, as though it had been cut off by a knife, and smooth, open, green fields began. In the distance you could see other towns standing out like the castellated walls of earlier centuries--but here was an end, sharp, definite, final.