Page:Herbert Jenkins - Patricia Brent Spinster.djvu/296



EFORE she had been at Eastbourne twenty-four hours Patricia was convinced that she had made a mistake in going there. With no claims upon her time, the restlessness that had developed in London increased until it became almost unbearable. The hotel at which she was staying was little more than a glorified boarding-house, full of "the most jungly of jungle-people," as she expressed it to herself. Their well-meant and kindly efforts to engage her in their pursuits and pleasures she received with apathetic negation. At length her fellow-guests, seeing that she was determined not to respond to their overtures, left her severely alone. The men were the last to desist.

She came to dislike the pleasure-seekers about her and grew critical of everything she saw, the redness of the women's faces, the assumed youthfulness of the elderly men, the shapelessness of matrons who seemed to delight in bright open-work blouses and juvenile hats. She remembered Elton's remark that Fashion uncovers a multitude of shins. The shins exposed at Eastbourne were 286