'What is the name?'
'Wee Holme.'
'My God!' said Frederick Mulliner. 'It only needed that!'
The view which he had had of it from his brother's window should, no doubt, have prepared Frederick for the hideous loathsomeness of Bingley-on-Sea: but, as he walked along, he found it coming on him as a complete surprise. Until now he had never imagined that a small town could possess so many soul-searing features. He passed little boys, and thought how repulsive little boys were. He met tradesmen's carts, and his gorge rose at the sight of them. He hated the houses. And, most of all, he objected to the sun. It shone down with a cheeriness which was not only offensive but, it seemed to Frederick Mulliner, deliberately offensive. What he wanted was wailing winds and driving rain: not a beastly expanse of vivid blue. It was not that the perfidy of Jane Oliphant had affected him in any way: it was simply that he disliked blue skies and sunshine. He had a temperamental antipathy for them, just as he had a temperamental fondness for tombs and sleet and hurricanes and earthquakes and famines and pestilences and....
He found that he had arrived in Marazion Road.
Marazion Road was made up of two spotless pavements stretching into the middle distance and flanked by two rows of neat little red-brick villas. It smote Frederick like a blow. He felt as he looked at those houses, with their little brass knockers and little white curtains, that they were occupied by people who knew nothing of Frederick Mulliner and were content to know nothing; people who were simply not caring a whoop that only a few short months before the girl to whom he had been engaged had sent back his letters and gone and madly got herself betrothed to a man named Dillingwater.
He found Wee Holme, and hit it a nasty slap with its knocker. Footsteps sounded in the passage, and the door opened.
'Why, Master Frederick!' said Nurse Wilks. 'I should hardly have known you.'
Frederick, in spite of the natural gloom caused by the blue sky and the warm sunshine, found his mood lightening somewhat. Something that might almost have been a spasm of tenderness passed through him. He was not a bad-hearted young man—he ranked in that respect, he supposed, somewhere mid-way between his brother George, who had a heart of gold, and people like the future Mrs Dillingwater, who had no heart at all—and there was a fragility about Nurse Wilks that first astonished and then touched him.
The images which we form in childhood are slow to fade: and Frederick had been under the impression that Nurse Wilks was fully six feet tall, with the shoulders of a weight-lifter and eyes that glittered cruelly beneath beetling brows. What he saw now was a little old woman with a wrinkled face, who looked as if a puff of wind would blow her away.