The main street had a lackadaisical air and the doctor’s motor seemed a trifle out of place. The housewives did their housekeeping in a leisurely manner they gossiped with the butcher as they watched him cut from his cut from his great joint of South down a price of the best end of the neck, and they asked amiably after the grocer’s wife as he put half a pound of tea and a packet of salt into their string bag. I do not know whether Elsom was ever fashionable: it certainly was not so then; but it was respectable and cheap. Elderly ladies, maiden and widowed, lived there.