Helen, whose brain was nimble enough to take in some of Mrs.
Vavasour's limitations, hoped that the preliminary inquiry into her
caste was ended. She went into the corridor. A man made room for
her with an alacrity that threatened an attempt to draw her into
conversation, so she moved somewhat farther away, and gave herself to
thought. If this prying woman was a fair sample of the people in the
hotel, it was obvious that the human element in the high Alps held a
suspicious resemblance to society in Bayswater, where each street is a
faction and the clique in the "Terrace" is not on speaking terms with
the clique in the "Gardens." Thus far, she owned to a feeling of
disillusionment in many respects.

Two years earlier, a naturalist in the Highlands had engaged von
Eulenberg to classify his collection, and Helen had gone to Inverness
with the professor's family. She saw something then of the glories of
Scotland, and her memories of the purple hills, the silvery lakes, the
joyous burns tumbling headlong through woodland and pasture, were not
dimmed by the dusty garishness of the Swiss scenery. True, Baedeker
said that these pent valleys were suffocating in midsummer. She could
only await in diminished confidence her first glimpse of the eternal
snows.

And again, the holiday makers were not the blithesome creatures of her
imagination. Some were reading, many sleeping, and the rest, for the
most part, talking in strange tongues of anything but the beauties
of the landscape. The Britons among them seemed to be brooding on
glaciers. A party of lively Americans were playing bridge, and a scrap
of gossip in English from a neighboring compartment revealed that some
woman who went to a dance at Montreux, "wore a cheap voile, my dear, a
last year's bargain, all crumpled and dirty. You never saw such a
fright!"

These things were trivial and commonplace; a wide gap opened between
them and Helen's day dreams of Alpine travel. By natural sequence of
ideas she began to contrast her present loneliness with yesterday's
pleasant journey, and the outcome was eminently favorable to Mark
Bower. She missed him. She was quite sure, had he accompanied her from
Zurich, that he would have charmed away the dull hours with amusing
anecdotes. Instead of feeling rather tired and sleepy, she would now
be listening to his apt expositions of the habits and customs of the
places and people seen from the carriage windows. For fully five
minutes he