Hyde Park Corner
sooner or later no matter how far afield one wandered.

East of Budapest her complacency began to filter away, and when she saw
her husband treating the Black Sea with a familiarity which she had never
been able to assume towards the English Channel, misgivings began to
crowd in upon her. Adventures which would have presented an amusing and
enticing aspect to a better-bred woman aroused in Vanessa only the twin
sensations of fright and discomfort. Flies bit her, and she was
persuaded that it was only sheer boredom that prevented camels from doing
the same. Clyde did his best, and a very good best it was, to infuse
something of the banquet into their prolonged desert picnics, but even
snow-cooled Heidsieck lost its flavour when you were convinced that the
dusky cupbearer who served it with such reverent elegance was only
waiting a convenient opportunity to cut your throat. It was useless for
Clyde to give Yussuf a character for devotion such as is rarely found in
any Western servant. Vanessa was well enough educated to know that all
dusky-skinned people take human life as unconcernedly as Bayswater folk
take singing lessons.

And with a growing irritation and querulousness on her part came a
further disenchantment, born of the inability of husband and wife to find
a common ground of interest. The habits and migrations of the sand
grouse, the folklore and customs of Tartars and Turkomans, the points of
a Cossack pony--these were matter which evoked only a bored indifference
in Vanessa. On the other hand, Clyde was not thrilled on being informed
that the Queen of Spain detested mauve, or that a certain Royal duchess,
for whose tastes he was never likely to be called on to cater, nursed a
violent but perfectly respectable passion for beef olives.

Vanessa began to arrive at the conclusion that a husband who added a
roving disposition to a settled income was a mixed blessing. It was one
thing to go to the end of the world; it was quite another thing to make
oneself at home there. Even respectability seemed to lose some of its
virtue when one practised it in a tent.

Bored and disillusioned with the drift of her new life, Vanessa was
undisguisedly glad when distraction offered itself in the person of Mr.
Dobrinton, a chance acquaintance whom they had first run against in the
primitive hostelry of a benighted Caucasian town. Dobrinton was
elaborately British, in deference perhaps to the memory of