r looking
toward the lane and fields. But here the very gleams of sunshine seemed
melancholy, for the autumnal leaves and grass were shivering, and the
wind was turning up the feathers of a cock and two croaking hens which
had doubtless parted with their grown-up offspring and did not know
what to do with themselves. The railway official also seemed without
resources, and his innocent demeanor in observing Gwendolen and her
trunks was rendered intolerable by the cast in his eye; especially
since, being a new man, he did not know her, and must conclude that she
was not very high in the world. The vehicle--a dirty old barouche--was
within sight, and was being slowly prepared by an elderly laborer.
Contemptible details these, to make part of a history; yet the turn of
most lives is hardly to be accounted for without them. They are
continually entering with cumulative force into a mood until it gets
the mass and momentum of a theory or a motive. Even philosophy is not
quite free from such determining influences; and to be dropped solitary
at an ugly, irrelevant-looking spot, with a sense of no income on the
mind, might well prompt a man to discouraging speculation on the origin
of things and the reason of a world where a subtle thinker found
himself so badly off. How much more might such trifles tell on a young
lady equipped for society with a fastidious taste, an Indian shawl over
her arm, some twenty cubic feet of trunks by her side, and a mortal
dislike to the new consciousness of poverty which was stimulating her
imagination of disagreeables? At any rate they told heavily on poor
Gwendolen, and helped to quell her resistant spirit. What was the good
of living in the midst of hardships, ugliness, and humiliation? This
was the beginning of being at home again, and it was a sample of what
she had to expect.

Here was the theme on which her discontent rung its sad changes during
her slow drive in the uneasy barouche, with one great trunk squeezing
the meek driver, and the other fastened with a rope on the seat in
front of her. Her ruling vision all the way from Leubronn had been that
the family would go abroad again; for of course there must be some
little income left--her mamma did not mean that they would have
literally nothing. To go to a dull place abroad and live poorly, was
the dismal future that threatened her: she had seen plenty of poor
English people abroad and imagined herself plunged in the despised
dullness of