t she preserved the tone of domestic life free from
every taint and promoted the refined development of her children; but
she selected them as well as she selected her friends. Somehow they
became better from the very fact of her being there, and her children
were smuggled in and out in the most extraordinary way; one never met
them racing and whooping, as one did hundreds of others, in the lobbies.
Her frequentation of hotels, where she paid enormous bills, was part of
her expensive but practical way of living, and also of her theory that,
from one week to another, she was going to Europe for a series of years
as soon as she had wound up certain complicated affairs which had
devolved upon her at her husband's death. If these affairs had dragged
on it was owing to their inherent troublesomeness and implied no doubt
of her capacity to bring them to a solution and to administer the very
considerable fortune that Mr. Temperly had left. She used, in a
superior, unprejudiced way, every convenience that the civilisation of
her time offered her, and would have lived without hesitation in a
lighthouse if this had contributed to her general scheme. She was now,
in the interest of this scheme, preparing to use Europe, which she had
not yet visited and with none of whose foreign tongues she was
acquainted. This time she was certainly embarking.

She took no notice of the discredit which her young friend appeared to
throw on the idea that she had nerves, and betrayed no suspicion that he
believed her to have them in about the same degree as a sound,
productive Alderney cow. She only moved toward one of the numerous doors
of the room, as if to remind him of all she had still to do before
night. They passed together into the long, wide corridor of the hotel--a
vista of soft carpet, numbered doors, wandering women and perpetual
gaslight--and approached the staircase by which she must ascend again to
her domestic duties. She counted over, serenely, for his enlightenment,
those that were still to be performed; but he could see that everything
would be finished by nine o'clock--the time she had fixed in advance.
The heavy luggage was then to go to the steamer; she herself was to be
on board, with the children and the smaller things, at eleven o'clock
the next morning. They had thirty pieces, but this was less than they
had when they came from California five years before. She wouldn't have
done that again. It was true that at that time sh