I like Elsom. It is a seaside in the south of England, not very far from brigton, and it has something of the late Georgian charm of the agreeable town. But it is neither bustling nor garish. Ten years ago, when I used it there not infrequently, you might still see here and there an old house, solid and pretentious in no unpleasing fashion (like a decayed gentlewoman of good family whose discreet pride in her ancestry amuses rather than offends you) which was built in the reign of the first gentleman in Europe and where a courtier of fallen fortunes may well have passed his declining years
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.