Read it through once

This great house, with its large and lofty rooms, its noble oaken staircases, its marble hall, long galleries and corridors, was scarcely the house which a man anxious to mark time in an unpretentious fashion was likely to choose. Nor, had he stopped for one moment to consider, would he have chosen Lyme Regis as a retreat, for it was then practically at the height of its fashionable prosperity, with its gay Assembly Rooms, the resort of those on whom Bath and Brighthelmstone were beginning to pall, and who were henceforth to divide their patronage between this Dorsetshire rendezvous and that other, just awakened, resort still further westward round the coast and destined, in the slow course of a century, to become the imperiously aristocratic Torquay.