nds suggested an answer to a
dim question that had begun to hover in her travel-worn mind. One came
back every summer to the Hotel Talleyrand for the purpose of getting
clothes; that, perhaps, was a sufficient answer. Yet, to-day, it did not
seem sufficient. She was not really so very much interested in her
clothes; not nearly enough interested to make them a compensation for
such fatigue and loneliness as she was now feeling. And as she realised
this, a further question followed: in what was she particularly
interested? What was a sufficient motive for all the European
journeyings with which her life, for the past ten or twelve years, had
been filled? In a less jaded mood, in her usual mood of mild, if rather
wistful, assurance, she would have answered at once that she was
interested in everything--in everything that was of the best--pictures,
music, places, and people. These surely were her objects.

She was that peculiarly civilised being, the American woman of
independent means and discriminating tastes, whose cosmopolitan studies
and acquaintances give, in their multiplicity, the impression of a full,
if not a completed, life. But to-day the gloomy question hovered: was
not the very pilgrimage to Bayreuth, the study of archaeology in Rome,
and of pictures in Florence, of much the same nature as the yearly visit
to Paris for clothes? What was attained by it all? Was it not something
merely superficial, to be put on and worn, as it were, not to be lived
for with a growing satisfaction? Miss Jakes did not answer this
question; she dismissed it with some indignation, and she got up and
rang rather sharply for tea, which was late; and after asking the
garcon, with a smile that in its gentleness contrasted with the
sharpness of the pull, that it might be brought at once, she paused near
the table to lean over and smell her sheaf of roses, and to read again,
listlessly, Miss Harriet Robinson's words of affectionate greeting. Miss
Robinson was a middle-aged American lady who lived in Paris, and had
long urged Althea to settle there near her. Ten years ago, when she had
first met Miss Robinson in Boston, Althea had thought her a brilliant
and significant figure; but she had by now met too many of her kind--in
Rome, in Florence, in Dresden--to feel any wish for a more intimate
relationship. She was fond of Miss Robinson, but she prayed that fate
did not reserve for her a withering to the like brisk, colourless
spinsterhood.