But it was a horrible
mask. It had been started on foundations of good stone, with
true French lordliness: but it parodied--or, rather, it
satirised--the ambitious French tendency to impose architecture
upon nature. Behind the facade, through which the wind
whistled, all was an unroofed mass of rusted girders and joists;
a skeleton framework about which I climbed--the first and last
guest--conning and guessing where suites of rooms had been
planned, to be adorned with Louis Seize furniture, for a host of
fellow-guests that had never come and now would never arrive to
make merry. I clambered along a girder, off which my heels
scaled the rust in long flakes, and thrust my head through one
of the great empty windows to take in the view.
"--Which was indeed magnificent. But my eye switched from it to
a mean little human figure, moving along the foreshore with a
gait which, even at a goodish distance, I recognised for
Farrell's. It looked like a beetle creeping, nearing, across
the flats and hummocks.
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