ive 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
than eleven days--for her personal private holiday. Much of her recent
intercourse with Mr. Mudge had consisted of the hopes and fears,
expressed mainly by himself, involved in the question of their getting
the same dates--a question that, in proportion as the delight seemed
assured, spread into a sea of speculation over the choice of where and
how. All through July, on the Sunday evenings and at such other odd
times as he could seize, he had flooded their talk with wild waves of
calculation. It was practically settled that, with her mother, somewhere
"on the south coast" (a phrase of which she liked the sound) they should
put in their allowance together; but she already felt the prospect quite
weary and worn with the way he went round and round on it. It had become
his sole topic, the theme alike of his most solemn prudences and most
placid jests, to which every opening led for return and revision and in
which every little flower of a foretaste was pulled up as soon as
planted. He had announced at the earliest day--characterising the whole
business, from that moment, as their "plans," under which name he handled
it as a Syndicate handles a Chinese or other Loan--he had promptly
declared that the question must be thoroughly studied, and he produced,
on the whole subject, from day to day, an amount of information that
excited her wonder and even, not a little, as she frankly let him know,
her disdain. When she thought of the danger in which another pair of
lovers rapturously lived she enquired of him anew why he could leave
nothing to chance. Then she got for answer that this profundity