So in the first week of August the Masterman household accomplished its annual exodus, and Arthur found himself one of five hundred tenants in a vast hotel at Brighton. Brighton is not precisely a pleasant place in August--"a sea without a ship, and a shore without a tree"--but undeniably it has at all seasons a certain strong glitter of life, and its shipless sea is an inexhaustible reservoir of tonic breezes. But poetry does not breathe in the air of Brighton, and Arthur's heart was at the stage when poetry is indispensable to happiness. He could have been relatively happy in some deep Scotch glen, whipping a stream for the infrequent trout, and listening unconsciously to the wind-music in the fir-tops; for though he would still have been separated from Elizabeth, he would have seen her face mirrored in the stream, and heard her voice in the wind, and have felt her presence in the wide peacefulness. But the hard materialism of Brighton jarred upon his senses. It was London over again, a cleaner and a meaner London. The same kind of face met him everywhere--the heavy, soulless face of men who have their portion in this world. In the men it was a clean-shaved, rubicund face, in the women it was puffed and sometimes rouged; and this face was reduplicated everywhere--in the hotel, on the parade, on the pier, till it became a persecution such as one suffers in dreams. Looking at these faces, Arthur had not only a strong repulsion, but he knew the cause of it; these faces were the mirror of unclean souls. There was something dark and turbid in them, a mire of sin washed up from the abhorred depth of life; these eyes all had the same expression, something of greed and glassy insolence and vulpine shrewdness, and the mouths had the same looseness of sensual thirst. Perhaps he did not see with entire justice, for Elizabeth's face hung like a picture in his heart, before which he had built a shrine and lit a lamp of faith; or perhaps he did see with perfect lucidity the souls of these fellow creatures of his, simply because that lamp of pure love in his heart gave him light. At all events, he hated Brighton, and betook himself daily to the green empty Downs, and sometimes as far as Chantlebury Ring, where the width of the world could be felt once more, and the shy voice of love might be heard, like a cuckoo-note, in the great sylvan silences.