ks, no
doubt, is not very long under ordinary circumstances: he had not
imagined that it might seem almost unendurably long to a man who had
been married less than a year to a wife that he loved. And yet, before
he had been there three days, he was conscious that each separate hour
had to be encountered, wrestled with, conquered, before going on to the
next. He had meant to write: there was a point of administration upon
which he had intended to say his say in one of the Reviews. But somehow
in that sitting-room, with the windows opening down to the garden, the
steady work, which in his own study would have been a matter of course,
seemed almost impossible. Then he thought he would read. He read aloud
to Rachel for part of the day; but he did not dare to choose anything
that was much good to himself, as he had been told that the more
inactive her mind was the better. Something he would have to do; he
would have to organise his daily life in some way that would make the
burden of it endurable. He made up his mind to take long walks--the
hotel and pavilion lay on the outskirts of the town--to go into the
outlying country and explore it on foot. But in the evenings when Rachel
was gone to bed, and when, alone at last, he would try to concentrate
his mind on the study or the writing to which he had been used so
eagerly to turn, another thought that he had been keeping at bay by a
conscious effort would rush at him again and overwhelm him.

In the meantime, at the other side of Bad-Schleppenheim, the hours were
flying fast and gaily. From the moment when the visitors met together at
an early hour in the morning to drink their glasses of Schleppenheim
water, and onwards through the luncheon parties, excursions, walking up
and down, listening to the band, seeing theatricals, or playing Bridge
in the evening, there was never a moment in which they were not
industriously engaged in the pursuit of something. It was mostly
pleasure, though many of them imagined it was health. Many of the people
who in London constituted Society were here, in an inner and hallowed
circle, in the centre of which were many minor and a few major royalties
out of every country in Europe; and revolving round them in wider
circles outside, many other people who, at home just on the verge of
being in Society, revelled in the thought that here, under altered
conditions, and in the enforced juxtapositions of life in a
watering-place, a special talent for te