Undine Marvell, for the next few months, tasted all
the accumulated bitterness of failure. After
January the drifting hordes of her compatriots had
scattered to the four quarters of the globe, leaving
Paris to resume, under its low grey sky, its compacter
winter personality. Noting, from her more and
more deserted corner, each least sign of the social
revival, Undine felt herself as stranded and baffled
as after the ineffectual summers of her girlhood.
She was not without possible alternatives; but the
sense of what she had lost took the savour from all
that was left. She might have attached herself
to some migratory group winged for Italy or Egypt;
but the prospect of travel did not in itself appeal
to her, and she was doubtful of its social benefit.
She lacked the adventurous curiosity which seeks its
occasion in the unknown; and though she could work
doggedly for a given object the obstacles to be overcome
had to be as distinct as the prize. Her one desire
was to get back an equivalent of the precise value
she had lost in ceasing to be Ralph Marvell’s
wife. Her new visiting-card, bearing her Christian
name in place of her husband’s, was like the
coin of a debased currency testifying to her diminished
trading capacity. Her restricted means, her vacant
days, all the minor irritations of her life, were
as nothing compared to this sense of a lost advantage.
Even in the narrowed field of a Parisian winter she
might have made herself a place in some more or less
extra-social world; but her experiments in this line
gave her no pleasure proportioned to the possible derogation.
She feared to be associated with “the wrong people,”
and scented a shade of disrespect in every amicable
advance. The more pressing attentions of one
or two men she had formerly known filled her with a
glow of outraged pride, and for the first time in
her life she felt that even solitude might be preferable
to certain kinds of society. Since ill health
was the most plausible pretext for seclusion, it was
almost a relief to find that she was really growing
“nervous” and sleeping badly. The
doctor she summoned advised her trying a small quiet
place on the Riviera, not too near the sea; and thither
in the early days of December, she transported herself
with her maid and an omnibus-load of luggage.
The place disconcerted her by being really small and
quiet, and for a few days she struggled against the
desire for flight. She had never before known
a world as colourless and negative as that of the large
white hotel where everybody went to bed at nine, and
donkey-rides over stony hills were the only alternative
to slow drives along dusty roads. Many of the
dwellers in this temple of repose found even these
exercises too stimulating, and preferred to sit for
hours under the palms in the garden, playing Patience,
embroidering, or reading odd volumes of Tauchnitz.
Undine, driven by despair to an inspection of the hotel
