that money can buy; lavishly provided with newspapers and books of
reference; lighted by tall windows in the day-time, and by gorgeous
chandeliers at night, may be nevertheless one of the dreariest places
of rest and shelter that can be found on the civilised earth. Such
places exist, by hundreds, in those hotels of monstrous proportions and
pretensions, which now engulf the traveller who ends his journey on the
pier or the platform. It may be that we feel ourselves to be strangers
among strangers--it may be that there is something innately repellent
in splendid carpets and curtains, chairs and tables, which have no
social associations to recommend them--it may be that the mind loses
its elasticity under the inevitable restraint on friendly
communication, which expresses itself in lowered tones and instinctive
distrust of our next neighbour; but this alone is certain: life, in the
public drawing-room of a great hotel, is life with all its healthiest
emanations perishing in an exhausted receiver.

On the same day, and nearly at the same hour, when Ovid had left his
house, two women sat in a corner of the public room, in one of the
largest of the railway hotels latterly built in London.

Without observing it themselves, they were objects of curiosity to
their fellow-travellers. They spoke to each other in a foreign
language. They were dressed in deep mourning--with an absence of
fashion and a simplicity of material which attracted the notice of
every other woman in the room. One of them wore a black veil over her
gray hair. Her hands were brown, and knotty at the joints; her eyes
looked unnaturally bright for her age; innumerable wrinkles crossed and
re-crossed her skinny face; and her aquiline nose (as one of the ladies
present took occasion to remark) was so disastrously like the nose of
the great Duke of Wellington as to be an offensive feature in the face