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 of a woman.

The lady's companion, being a man, took a more merciful view. "She can't
help being ugly," he whispered. "But see how she looks at the girl with
her. A good old creature, I say, if ever there was one yet." The lady
eyed him, as only a jealous woman can eye her husband, and whispered
back, "Of course you're in love with that slip of a girl!"

She _was_ a slip of a girl--and not even a tall slip. At seventeen years
of age, it was doubtful whether she would ever grow to a better height.

But a girl who is too thin, and not even so tall as the Venus de'
Medici, may still be possessed of personal attractions. It was not
altogether a matter of certainty, in this case, that the attractions
were sufficiently remarkable to excite general admiration. The fine
colour and the plump healthy cheeks, the broad smile, and the regular
teeth, the well-developed mouth, and the promising bosom which form
altogether the average type of beauty found in the purely bred English
ma