to follow the refined to the extent of knowing--they had made so many of
their arrangements with her aid--exactly where they were; yet she felt
quite as if the panorama had ceased unrolling and the band stopped
playing. A stray member of the latter occasionally turned up, but the
communications that passed before her bore now largely on rooms at
hotels, prices of furnished houses, hours of trains, dates of sailings
and arrangements for being "met"; she found them for the most part
prosaic and coarse. The only thing was that they brought into her stuffy
corner as straight a whiff of Alpine meadows and Scotch moors as she
might hope ever to inhale; there were moreover in especial fat hot dull
ladies who had out with her, to exasperation, the terms for seaside
lodgings, which struck her as huge, and the matter of the number of beds
required, which was not less portentous: this in reference to places of
which the names--Eastbourne, Folkestone, Cromer, Scarborough,
Whitby--tormented her with something of the sound of the plash of water
that haunts the traveller in the desert. She had not been out of London
for a dozen years, and the only thing to give a taste to the present dead
weeks was the spice of a chronic resentment. The sparse customers, the
people she did see, were the people who were "just off"--off on the decks
of fluttered yachts, off to the uttermost point of rocky headlands where
the very breeze was then playing for the want of which she said to
herself that she sickened.

There was accordingly a sense in which, at such a period, the great
differences of the human condition could press upon her more than ever; a
circumstance drawing fresh force in truth from the very fact of the
chance that at last, for a change, did squarely meet her--the chance to
be "off," for a bit, almost as far as anybody. They took their turns in
the cage as they took them both in the shop and at Chalk Farm; she had
known these two months that time was to be allowed in September--no less