. The dingy torpor of the railway station,
before the ticket could be taken, was still worse. Gwendolen had
certainly hardened in the last twenty-four hours: her mother's trouble
evidently counted for little in her present state of mind, which did
not essentially differ from the mood that makes men take to worse
conduct when their belief in persons or things is upset. Gwendolen's
uncontrolled reading, though consisting chiefly in what are called
pictures of life, had somehow not prepared her for this encounter with
reality. Is that surprising? It is to be believed that attendance at
the _opera bouffe_ in the present day would not leave men's minds
entirely without shock, if the manners observed there with some
applause were suddenly to start up in their own families. Perspective,
as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp
huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through
aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish
over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and
artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other
painful effects when presented incur personal experience.

Mrs. Davilow felt Gwendolen's new phase of indifference keenly, and as
she drove back alone, the brightening morning was sadder to her than
before.

Mr. Grandcourt called that day at Offendene, but nobody was at home.

CHAPTER XV.

"_Festina lente_--celerity should be contempered with
cunctation."--SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

Gwendolen, we have seen, passed her time abroad in the new excitement
of gambling, and in imagining herself an empress of luck, having
brought from her late experience a vague impression that in this
confused world it signified nothing what any one did, so that they
amused themselves. We have seen, too, that certain persons,
mysteriously symbolized as Grapnell & Co., having also thought of
reigning in the realm of luck, and being also bent on amusing
themselves, no matter how, had brought about a painful change in her
family circumstances; whence she had returned home--carrying with her,
against her inclination, a necklace which she had pawned and some one
else had redeemed.

While she was going back to England, Grandcourt was coming to find her;
coming, that is, after his own manner--not in haste by express straight
from Diplow to Leubronn, where she was understood to be; but so
entirely without hurry that h